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Nat Jenkins



Last Updated: 11/23/2009

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Status: Single
City: London
Country: UK
Signup Date: 4/1/2006

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Sunday, August 30, 2009 

Tonight the river rats sail again. Here some memories from last year. 

x


It all started on a rainy day in Feburary last year when I took a walk down to Nambucca - now sadly deceased. I walked up those familiar old dusty stairs passed the many little smokey rooms and corridors to Jay’s ‘ study’ on the top floor - awash with unwashed plates and scattered pieces of paper. I sat down on the old leather sofa, lit a cigarette and started to tell Jay about this idea I had. So, said Jay, ‘ we’re talking boats today’.
The idea would depend upon rounding up as many London bands as could possibly be persuaded to spend a week together in the cramped and clostrophobic cabins of boats they didn’t know how to sail in a bid to navigate our way down the Thames playing a host of shows in quick sucession - for free. It sounded pretty far out - pub talk - fantasy stuff. 
But Jay being Jay liked the idea from the off. His ears pricked up straight way but not, perhaps, as quickly as did Ally Wolf’s who happened to be sitting at a computer screen in the corner.  He turned around on his swivel chair - 
‘ We’ve got a barge. What you guys talking about exactly ?’. 
I’m not a superstitious man but it was one of those moments that smacked of destiny. Ally was managing a band called Six Nation State - five minutes later he was already on the phone to Keon - their tour manager who along with Philly - his fiance - had been gutting, stripping and renovating a 70ft barge in a warehouse somewhere out of town. We got to work straight away.

Finding The river rats.
The first thing was to find the bands - and to find the right bands. We had to assemble a pack of musicians ready to work hard, bear long hours, harsh weather conditions and a whole lot of hendonism - who would be ready to put all egos aside and to become, for at least one week, a crew.
After myself and Jay  the first band on board was Six Nation State - all five of the sweaty bastards and thier sweet melodic gypsy punk. Next in was Jack from Naked and the Boys - an old comrade from adventures past with whom I’d thrown the idea around a couple of times as we sat freezing on the embankment with cans of cheap flat beer. Next in - cue a chap named Josh Weller I’d met down at the Bronze club where the two of us had been hanging out for many drunken Friday nights over the winter months. He was followed closely by the hosts of Bronze Club themselves The Golden Silvers.  Due to spacial restrictions Gwil Golden stood in to play solo.
Next up was a man by the name of Derek Meins I’d met and played with in my Brighton days. He’d come down to Brighton after his band The Eastern Lains split and was now recording his first album and running a night in soho called The Soapbox. Jay went on to recrute Jay Jay Pistolet. Justin was game too. It was coming together piece by piece. 
It felt a little bit like rounding up The Magnificent Seven - or so at least it felt to me and Ally as we sat over a table of beers in Hoxton bars throwing names around, pouring over maps of Thames and despearatly going over equasions - calculating distances, speeds, numbers of locks - trying to work out long it was gonna take us to get from town to town- something totally fucking unknowable as it depended on so many variables - yet totally fucking crucial to the whole enterprize. 
We were feeling pretty good about the crew but needed one more act. I gave my friend Jamie a ring. He turned me on to a band called Mumford and Sons. I vaguely remembered having played with Marcus at The Bosuns a year or so back on one of those many cramped folk nights and knew Ben from communion nights  but hadnever seen the guys play as a band. I was blown away. We didn’t even meet with them about it. I think Ally gave someone a ring. They were in and we had found the River Rats. 

 
The Departure. 
The day finally rolled around. After a raucous gig at Dingwalls the six nation barge left Camden heading south. Early the next morning myself, isla macleoud, Derek Meins and Rob Mavers arrived at quiet little boat yard in Oxford and were shown aboard our 70ft narrow boat. Half an hour later Jack and the Mumford boys turned up and , much to the consternation of the yard owner, began loading in endless banjos, acordians, guitars, fancy dress outfits, bizzare hats and crates upon crates of booze. 
After reassuring the owner that we knew exactly what we were doing we proceeded to crash his boat straight into the opposite bank very very slowly - then after a greta efforst we managed to turn it and crasjh very very slowly into the next bank. We left him looking white as a ghost as we merrily waved from the decks. 
Cruising down the Oxford canal was beautiful - all dappled light making patterns in the shimmering water. We soon got the hang of the old locks and were working as a team - throwing ropes to each other - hoping from boat to shore like old hands, winding back the big gates to let the river in and out. Marcus mumford was quite a sight in his top hat and waistcoat - looking like he just stepped right out of a Dickens novel and onto the oxford canal - Derek Meins sitting back in his boating hat and deck chair and sipping cider.
By the time we pulled in at night fall we felt like an old gang and all very easy in each others company. Jack put a pot on the stove and started cooking up a big vegetable stew - Ben chopping vegetables, Isla running aorund with her camera snapping everything and filling everyones glasses with endless wine. Marcus and Derek sitting smoking on the cabin - Mavo and Ted twanging away on a twelve string and a banjo in the bedrooms. 
We all sat down to a meal together and toasted the trip ahead - feeling very warm and pleased with ourselves and thinking what a civiliszed little outing this was turning out to be. A few bottles later things were getting a little rowdier. Wraps were getting opened and the licqour we had been planning to save was already rolling. We poured out of the boat and decided to explore the woods around the shore. After awhile Derek and Mavo came back having found an abandoned barn somwhere down the river. So it was that we spent the rest of the night having our own barn dance - climbing rafters to the ceiling, throwing hay around and swaping instruments and smokes. Sure enough our plans to get to bed early, wake up early and stay sober - had evaporated with the coming dawn. We stumbled back to the boat barely still able to stand up right.
Dave - a friend of Keon’s from the other boat - had kindly offered to come along with us on the down river trip. As the only one with any real experience he had been manning the tiller all day and had wisely turned in early. We decided that we would ‘ surpirze’ him by heading off down the river before he woke up and showing him how much progress we had made. Well surprize him we did. Poor Dave woke up having been thrown violently out of his bunk by an almighty crash into the bank. The tiller broke straight off and without any steering and not really knowing how the fuck to stop the thing we were surfing up and down the banks - zig zgaging form left to right in a drunken down stream stagger. The only way we found that we could stop the thing from running aground and flooding was to have four or five of us up at the front with poles pushing away at the oncoming banks. Poor Dave ran out on deck in his boxers and shouted ‘ what the fuck do you think your doing ?’ Someone up front shouted back - ‘ we’re making time !’. 

So now a big fuck off storm break out and we’re stuck and broken down in the middle of nowhere. We’re missing the tools we need for Dave to fix the engine. Derek remembers that his friend and producer - Iain - live somewhere on the river and bikes off into the storm to find his house. We don’t hold up much hope but he re - emmerges wet to the bone half an hour later with a tool box and Dave struggling and cursing manages to get the thing back running and we’r e off again - all feeling a little shaky by now.
The water in the rive rising fast and we’re picking up a fair pace now. We pass through a lock and the lock keeper gives us a little card that politely informs us that our insurance is no longer valid and that there are ‘ lethal currents’ down stream. He asks us if our boat company had given us permission to continue and we tell him they have. David Bowie is blaring from the cabin and we are all wide eyed in ridiculous colored hats. He waves us on not having the faintest clue what to do with us. 
It’s at this point that Dave asks us for the maps. What maps ? It’s just ...well straight down river isn’t it ? You just go straight ? Apparently not. Dave is starting to get a little incredulous at all us wavering idiots who have still not slept - trying to man this boats through a storm. The only maps around are some kinda picturesque wall maps dated 1863. We all gather round trying to make out the tiny names on the chart but pathetically our vision is so blurred from excessive...everything...that we can’t read a word. In the end we al stand on deck and when islands suddenly emmerge out of the rain and Dave shouts ‘ left or right ?’ ….. ‘ letf or right you fuckers !’ - we make split moment decisions  - “ left !...no right ! ...right !’ and when big fallen trees appear in our path or we see ourselves suddenly heading fast for a dead end we run for barge poles and all heave and push to correct our trajectory. 
By the time mid day rolls around some of us are nervous wrecks. Me and Ben stand on deck and watch a weir approach out of the storm a big sign reads ‘ danger of death’ as the boat veers away from the weir and bangs hard against the edge. We all take it in turns to get some sleep but are routinely woken up by someone crashing or stalling. At one point Marcus take us headlong into a lock and we are all literally thrown from our bunks. I run up on deck in a panic thinking we might be about to sink. 
Later that evening thought, after I awake from an hour’s sleep, the sun is starting t creep through the clouds and there is an air or calm now on deck - people are sitting aorund smoking cigarettes and dipping their toe sin the water. Sure enough soon we are coming into the meeting point at Henley - in fact we are coming in a little bit too fast. I have to jump from the end of the boat to pull us in before we crash headlong into the six nation boat which has just pulled in from the other direction. I almost don’t suceed and the tour nearly ends with a  head on collision on day one.    

The shows - 
The first show we played everyone played a very neat 9 different sets with speedy change overs. By day two all sets had merged and nine bands had become one river rat band with everyone playing on each others songs. 
After playing to packed out sweaty bars and clubs in riverside towns we would roll back to the boats for big river side parties and jams that had the boast rocking back and forth dangerously low in the water with their over crowded loads. 
Days were spent wandering through posh towns like Henley and freaking out the local residents with our outlandish costumes ( straight out of Isla's wardrobe) and guitars slung over shoulders. One day in Henley David Cameron turned up to give a speech to his Tory heartland supporters and instead found twenty or so fuckheads in capes and top hats. Mr.Cameron couldnt take his eyes of Josh Weller's towering hairdo all the way through his speech on ' stealth tax'. Meanwhile secret service people surrounded us watchfully. 
We wander back to the boat. Gerry is frying up a barbeque. Josh and Jay are lying on the roofs of the boat debating about wether that was or wasnt a kestral that just flew overhead. The mumford boys are working out a new song on the river bank. Derek  is talking to some girls on the grass who stayed over after the show last night. Niel and Lexy are in hard hats seranading  bemused passers by with guitars. Isla is walking around in her fur coat snapping everything in site with her camera. A stray dog is helping it's self to our left overs while ducks and geese bob by on the river. 
The tour continues down river. In abbingdon we get beaten up by bouncers who accuse us of dealing drugs and launch themselves at us  on stage half way through a song - assaulting derek who is sitting behind the drums quietly. By Oxford half of us are ill and vomiting - Derek has been lying on his bunk for two days with a sauce pan balanced on his stomach. I have to ride down to the venue with my head out the window like a sick dog. Debauchery has taken its toll somewhat. However the final show proves the best of the whole  tour. 
At the end of the week we all leave the boats a little shell shocked - not quite believing that its all over. It had been quite a week - no arguments, no egos, no drownings, no electrocutions, only one fist fight, not too many crashes - just love, good times and good music.

 It can be done,

We leave again tommorow with a host of new bands - for more info go to myspace/riverrats or click the banner at the top of this page. 

much love
x

 


   






 
 
 
4:32 PM 
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Thursday, August 06, 2009 

Hey pals - I tried to keep this short and blog like - I failed. Here’s another rambling wordy account of my last two weeks. much much love to all. stay strong 
Nat 
x

1.
I arrived in Milan feeling hot and confused and hung over. 
The flight over had been nasty - really fucking nasty. Horrible turbulence kept the plane jerking about like a lunatic. It would periodically plunge and drop from the sky without warning.  I found myself idiotically gripping the seat in front of me all the way. 
By the time I got off the plane I was white as a ghost and soon sweating profusely in the mid day Italian sun. After an hour or two baking on the tarmac floor outside Milan’s Malpensa airport and desperately trying to re- string my battered little travel guitar, I caught a train and was soon drifting through incredible Swiss mountains, passing pristine deserted lakes and forests. London already seemed a long way away. 
At the other end I decided to try and hitch the ten mile journey on to the next town. I wound up lost somewhere by the side of a main road with no water and a spinning head. Everyone passing by seemed to be Swiss holiday makers in big four by fours full of bored kids and sweating dogs. They didn’t seem to keen on the idea of picking me up.
In the end I found a roadside café. I told them I’d come from London that morning and was trying to walk to Lacone. After nearly pissing them selves with laughter at the sight of me standing there confused and broken with my big tattered bag they took pity on me and drove me the remaining six or seven miles. I found the hotel pretty easily and asked at reception if The Kooks had checked in yet. They said they had but had already left for the next town an hour or two ago. I flopped down in the corner - exhausted. 
She didn’t seem to keen on me hanging around. I was just standing up to leave when out of the corner of my eye I see Hugh coming down the stairs wearing pink shorts and ray bans and carrying a book under his left arm. I am relieved to see him and he is somewhat surprized to see me. We go out and sit in the garden. In the distance, in between the jagged peaks of the seemingly never ending hills, you can just make out the slanted brick rooftops of the little town of Lacone where the festival will be taking place this evening. Hugh hands me a smoke and we sit back in silence in the big easy chairs and take it all in.    



2. 
After an evening of walking the town we head down to the piazza where the festival is happening. Paulo Nuttini plays a blinding set - which to be quite honest surprises me. His band are great - the new songs are great. It’s a great evening. We feel in hugh spirits now and after watching Duffy we go wandering drunk through town in a big pack stopping off at all sorts of weird little bars where their playing terrible Italian house music and middle aged women are gyrating on the dance floor to the joy of over excited teen DJs. We walk back to the festival enclosure where we find Duffy’s backing singers getting harranged by a weird balding Swiss man who claims he once played in an eighties rock band called ‘ Yellow’. We save them from him and along with a bunch of others take them back to the hotel with us where we sit out on the big balconyes in front of an assorted collection of over priced mini bar drinks and sing the night away on little acoustic guitars under the incredible blanket of stars. At about four everyone stumbles off to bed and I sleep on the sofa in Hugh’s room - my trusty ol’ bag as a pillow - safely enclosed by the surrounding mountains. 
3. 
The next day me and Luke take a fennicula up into the mountains. From there we get a sort of ski lift that take us ever higher up into the hills until our ears begin to pop and the air is thin with altitude. We walk through forests and hills that in winter time I guess are used ski slops but now in mid summer are deep green pastures and sunny fields. We sit look down on the vast lake below that runs all the way to Italy and was once crossed by Hemmingway on a rowing boat during the first world war. I have brought my little travel guitar with me and we play through a few new songs we have each been writing, adding harmonies here and there. We drink a few beers from a little bar by the edge of the woods and bum cigarettes of passing walkers. 
The Kooks play a great set that night as the sun dips down over the crowded piazza. Amy Mcdonald plays after and we sit with her and the band drinking the evening away in the deserted festival sight while security guards with fierce alsatain dogs prowl the grounds and rubbish collectors pick up the days discarded bottles from the ground. Everyone heads home early - each with journeys ahead the next morning. 
4. 

I got to Ventimglia about 9 that evening. I had an address scribbled on a bit of a paper - the hosue of a friend of mine who’d kindly agreed to let me stop off there for a day or two.In fact wasn’t even really an address at all. All the directions said were - ‘up mountain from Ventimiglia, go to L------ , walk half an hour on the only road there is out of town, cross the bridge, it’s the second house on the left’. 
Man... that didn’t sound too promising - and I didn’t even have a phone or anything. This whole plan seemed to be becoming increasingly crazy.
It was already getting dark as I wandered through Ventimiglia trying to catch a ride. I asked for directions at a bar and they just pointed up a big fuck of mounatin and shrugged.. I spent a very blue hour by the roadside smoking my last ciagerretts and sticking up ebnthusiastically with a  big flase smile of hope at all the passing cars winding their way up the mountainside. 
By now it was nightfall and I wandered back into town wondering what the hell I would do with myself that evening. I thought I might go sleep in the station but then I remembered what Italian train stations are like with their prowling rail staff prodding at sleeping travelers and their constant ear piercing over head annoucments. 
As it happens I’d been in Ventimilgia once before many years ago. I’d had the shit beaten out of me. Me and my friends Cosmo and Bilbo had walked arragontly into a late night bar and finished off a bottle of whiskey before walking calmly out the back door without paying a penny. We’d been traveling for a month or two and picked up the obnoxious habit of eating and drinking for free in any bar or restaurant that we deemed over priced tourist rip off joints. Ten minutes later the bar tenders had tracked us down, circled us with their motor bikes in a back street and watched while their midget balding boss beat the shit out of us one by one before taking any cash he could find on us and then literally running us out of town.
I guess we probably deserved it. Anyhow - I didn’t really fancy another night on the streets of Ventimiglia. I was starting to give up hope when I saw a late night ice cream palor on the side of an otherwise deserted street. There were a gang of young dudes standing outside by their bikes and sharing a bottle of wine. They seemed pretty hostile at first but when I offered round the last of my cigarrettes we got talking. In the end this geezer  with dodgy sort of mullet and a big beer belly and asks me if Im going up there to find a girl. When I say yes - which is after all is sorta true I  guess, he agrees to drive me up there as ‘ a matter of honor’.
So we get in to his little beat up black punto. He’s heavily fucking pissed. I can see that now and I’m already wondering there and then If I should call it off get out the car - take this one on the chin and find a place to sleep a few hours till morning - but I really wanna get up that fucking mountain tonight - feels like ive come all this way and am so close.  He sees my nervousnes and slaps me on the back - ‘ don’t worry brother, I know these roads like I know my hand. 
We shoot off into the night and are soon climbing the narrow mountain roads and leaving the town below is a haze of glittering little lights . He gives me a cd to put on. Their his own terrible happy hardcore/ house tracks - says he is a ‘famous local dj’ .
The music really gets him going, he pushes his foot down to the floor and the car lurches at a terrifying pace round the increasingly narrow and ill light roads of the mounatain. Oh God, oh please, please don’t let me die to a happy hardcore re- mix of ‘ teardrop on the dancefloor’. Please - anything but that.
So know he’s leaning over to me and going ‘ you like cocaine ? you like cocaine ? I love the cocaine ? tonight I take much much cocaine’. He takes both hands of the wheel to gesture the amount he has snorted and only just corrects the trajectory of the car at the next bend as we speed upwards. 
Suddenly his mood changes ubruptly - ‘ you know my friend - he is dead’. Jesus. I don’t really know what to say. He’s looking at me with these big sad eyes and I can’t help but wish they were focused on the road instead. ‘ Shit, Im sorry to hear that man’ I sort of mumble. ‘ Yes’ he replies somberly ‘ he is fucking dead’ and with a sudden surge of anger presses his foot down again and aclerates with a rush around the next corner. 
My seat belt isn’t working so I’ve sort of tied in an improvised belt around my waste and attached one end to the door handle. I’m holding on the seat for my fucking life. He takes out a little bottle of whiskey from the glove compartment and drinks before offering it to me - which given the circumstances I gladly accept. ‘ Yes’ he continues ‘ he die on these fucking roads - fucking idiot’.      
So by now I really wanna get the fuck out of this car but my driver aint having any of it. It’s a matter of honor. He will get me there he says - to the door. There’s no way he’ll have me walk. Besides, he says, drawing on the whiskey bottle, there are many many chingali - you know ? - wild boars in these hills - is not good walk alone here at night in this places’, Right now I think i’d take my chances with a whole herd of the fuckers. 
It occurs to me now that we’ve been going for quite a while. Sure enough - we’re completely fucking lost - he pulls over to a little way by with screech of the breaks that send dust flying in our wake. He gets out of the car and squints up the dark road. ‘ Oh shit’ he says ‘ I think we are in France man. Shit.....yeh this is definately France.’ Sure enough a roadside points the way back to Italy. 
Before I can say anything he’s back in the car and hurtling up another road. Im starting to have a serious failure of sense of humor when all of a sudden exactly what I have been waiting to happen, happens. He misses a turn on a particualy black part of the road and looses control of the car- a cliff face seems to appear out of nowhere. There is a massive screeching of brakes and my head slams down on the dash board. Then for a moment all is sillence, 
I pick myself up. I think I must have very briefly blacked out. There is a throbbing pain in my head and an aching in my back. Other than that I’m suprized to find that I’m absolutly alright. I look over at my companion and he is white as a ghsot and quiet for the first time all night just staring straight a head. The headlights light up the rock face and I kid you not - all bullshit aside - we are about two feet from this fucking cliff - two fucking feet. That would have been it - bang - simple as that. Considering I didn’t have any seat belt I was lucky to get off as it was with a bruised head - a little bit faster and I would have been through that fucking window - a little slower on the brakes and we would both have been crushed to fucking jelly. I decide to walk. 
This time the dude doesn’t try to stop me. I sit with him awhile while he calms down and give him the last of my water from bag. I advise he maybe rings a friend to pick him up and leaves his car for the night but he insists on driving back. He doesn’t even say goodbye he just zooms back off down the mountain with a screech of car wheels.
So I head off through the mountain back towards Italy from France - singing loudly to keep those fucking boars at bay - freaking out every slight movement in the shrubs. I’m feeling pretty good though all things considered - having just been in a minor car crash and totally fucking lost. Im just glad to be out of that fucking car. Besides there is a road sign or two along the way and after awhil I am back over the border and can see a little town shimmering away below me. It feels good to be up this high, alone again and finally in reach of my destination. 
However as I make the final descent down into the village I see my techno dj driver come rearing back up the road towards me. He brings the car to a halt about an inch from my feet and leans out the window spitting at me in a hurl of Italian abuse. Turns out I have his phone in my pocket. Id borrowed it to try to ring those girls and forgotten to give it back. I hand it over. He calls me thief, liar, English scum, pig of madonna. I try to explain but he’s fucking livid and unbuckling his belt to come talk to me in the street. At this point I decide it’s time to put and end to our brief aquataince and leg it down a little alleyway.

3. 
At this point I think it would be fair to say that there are probably those amongst you who think this story is a load of shit. I think that’s probably also what the two girls I was staying with thought when they came to meet me at the bar at about midnight and found me there - a worn out wreck jibbering into my half drunk beer about a coke fuelled dj threatening to run me over in a black punto. They were only half expecting me to show up anyway and certainly not late at night in a state of nervous exhaustion.
It certainly had been a strange evening and  certainly not the glorious arrival that I had boyishly envisioned in which I appeared heroically and mysteriously out of the wilderness with only my pack on my back and my guitar in my hand having climbed the mountain alone. 
That night they took me back to their beautiful house - which was indeed in THE middle of fucking nowhere - and set me up with a fold up bed on the kitchen floor. There I stayed for a week in the idyliic countryside, swimming with fish in mountain rivers, eating fresh fruit and vegetables, writing songs lazily in the midafternoon heat and taking evening walks to the local town for beers and a little light chat with the local bar keeper. By the time the week was up I was rested and ready to get going again. Itching in fact. Itching - I thought I might give hitching a miss for awhile though. I booked myself on a train to Paris.  

Alma - if by any chance you are reading this thank you so much for taking me in and putting up with me and my weirdness for a whole week. I had the best time and you are a true pal. 

4.
I love riding night trains perhaps more than anything else in the world - partly for the weird weird assortment of people you get on them - suspicious families in couchettes nervously eyeing the drunken backpackers eyeing up their young daughters. Young kids full of excitement on the road for the first time and taking pictures of everyone and everything. Seasoned hippies on some weird and obscure festival trail, twirling their girl friend’s dreads and cooly eyeing the straighter travelers as they board and depart with their encumbersome suitcases. Bums and drifters without tickets crouched for hours in the tiny toilets while angry inspectors bang and bang on locked doors. 
I remember doing the same thing many times before on these trains and enjoy sitting on my bag by the wide windows and reminicing to myself about all the many other times I have ridden this exact train - all the friends I used to travel with and the people we met. Especially my dear friend Cosmo with whom I would ride these trains with a lot in my teens, sharing bottles of cheap cider, smoking joints out of half opened windows and listening to Bob Dyaln songs out of one speaker on a broken walkman. Cosmo sadly passes away last year and I have been missing very much throughout the course of this trip - as I always do - and remembering our silly and always comical adventures together on these rails. 
Tonight I have a bed booked in a compartment - a luxury compared to previous trips. I go to dump by bag in there. There are two unbelievably beautiful French girls in the top bunks and one very snooty looking French kid in the bunk below opposite mine. I think he must be the boyfriend of one of the girls. He doesn’t look very pleased to see me. The girls however seems very sweet and friendly. I dump my pack down and take out a bottle of wine I have been keeping and offer it around. One of the girls takes a swig and the boy in the bunk leans up on his elbow and spits something at her in ricatto French and she hands it back moodily. He says ‘ we do not drink wine tonight’ and fixes me with a mean glare. 
Well that’s that I think to myslef. I’m not too fussed. I’m in a good mood tonight and don’t wanna bullshit with anyone. I bid them good evening and head off down the train with my guitar looking for some more welcoming people. There are plenty. I go from carriage ti carriage sharing out my wine with people and being offered drinks in return. I play songs in the corridors and happily take requests of cheesy classic busker tunes until the guard comes and tells me to stop playing or get off the train. When he’s gone we carry on accapella and smoke hastily puffed ciagrettes whenevecver the train stops at a station then leap back on as the automatic doors stubornly clang shut. Once or twoce we almost starnded in little stations after slightlly misjudging the timing. 
I meet a Korean kid travelling Europe for the first time who is about to go back to do two years national army service and is having a final blow out first. He’s the smiliest guy I’ve ever seen. Although he does an enthusiastic impression of shooting people with a machine gun, he doesn’t look like the most suitable soilder in the world and I kinda worry about him a little bit. In the end I end up seeing the rest of the night out in a little cabin with a Tunisian factory worker living in Paris and a Parisian bicycle repair boy with a falsetto voice and ambitions to be an engineer. We end up drunkenly and very badly singing acapella Simon and Garfunkle songs at the Tunsian’s adamant insistence. Then I stumble of to sleep a few hours in my little bunk much to the tutting and huffing and puffing of my Parisian room mate and the nervous giggles of his French girlfriends. 

5.      
I wake up the next morning with my face mysteriously swollen and what’s looks like some kinda monstrous eye infection on the go. I see myself in the reflection of the stained toilet mirror and know it’s gonna be a bad day. 
Sure enough one thing follows another. I go to a bank machine to take out a little money for breakfast  ( I had not eaten since the previous morning) and the ATM tells me very courteously that I have reached my limit. Well that’s for sure. I decide it’s gotta be a mistake and check another and another and another - all to the same effect. I had banked on having at least 300 left and can’t work out what the fuck must have happened. Unless of course I spent a whole fucking lot on those nights out with The Kooks in those expensive little Swiss bars. I wouldn’t put it pass me. Three am rounds of drinks go all too easily drifting by im a merry drunken haze. 
Well this puts a whole new spin on things. I spend the last of my money on a phone card and - maybe a little foolishly - on a last packet of tobacco. I figure whatever happens im gonna need that. I had an assortment of names and numbers of people I had met in bars and at gigs I had played around Paris of the course of the last year - all written on a little scrap of paper. I found a phone box and dialed up every number. Every one went to answer phone.
I walked across town and into St. Germaine. It was about 8.00 am by now. I found my  
my friend’s apartment and spent about an hour shouting up to his window from the street and another sitting patiently on my bag by his door hoping he might show up. By midday I was starving and very dehydrated. I did my old trick of wandering to and from restaurant and pretending to study the menu while I filled my pockets up with table bread. Eventually I got kicked out of a riverside café by a waitress after she found me eating leftovers off a plate on the counter. I sat awhile by the river and though I might try to busk but broke the third string on my guitar leaving me with only a high e, b and a string. I was going to make any money with that. 
It was then I started getting really fucking sick. I lay under the bridge in a sort of trance and kept thinking that I saw people I knew passing by - a sure sign of exhaustion and lonliness. Some of these visions were almost hallucinagenic in their clarity and I even called out to one or two people. 
I was just reconciling myself to a night under a bridge when my luck changed. Daphne - a friend of a friend I had met once at a gig of mine - came through, picked up and agreed to take me in for a night or two. I could almost have cried with relief when she agreed to have me stay. She has an unbelivable apartment right by the Louvre and a pretty pink scooter that we went whizzing around town on together. She is also the sweetest and best girl in the world. It is here that I have been staying for the last week - busking by day for a bit of food money on the bridges and drinking by night on the point des art or  the monte marte or else scooting around little night bars in st. germaine with strangers met in the course of bright evenings by the seine. With the exception of a nasty bottle fight on the river - which is a whole other story - my stay has been gloriously uneventful and happy. 

To be continued. 

p.s Daphne if you are reading this also massive massive thanks to you for rescuing me from Parisian streets and being such a good pal and companion. 

x   
   

 


 



3:38 PM 
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Friday, July 10, 2009 
Sooooo.... this is goodbye for now my dear friends. I have just finished packing my bags and restringing my guitar and I am finally off - away ! gone !
 I have been looking forward to this moment for a long time. I played my last gig last night. No more shows now till till August. Nothing to do but play and be merry!
 I'm catching a ride with The Kooks up to a festival in Switzerland then I'm on my way down south  - on my lonesome for a whole sweet month. I've been trying to raise some cash - hasn't really worked out so i guess I'll be hitching all the way. There's a certain someone I wanna find in Italy - after that my summer is a blank white page as good ol' mr. mumford would put it - and Europe my oyster. It is gonna be good to be out on my own again - to say the least. Looking forward to leaving London behind for a time which, for all it's many virtues - ( and I do fucking love this city) , can bring a man down from time to time. 
 When I get back my album will finally be mixed. In the mean time I couldn't resist putting up a very raw unmixed song for you all - a little taster of things to come. I am the world's most inconsistent blogger - ( i never seem to do shit to this page - sorry bout that - me and the internet don't get on ) however I will do my best to drop a word or two about my adventures as I go.  
  Wish me luck my friends . I wish the same to you. Stay strong and have fun
GOOD TIMES !
All my love 
Nat 
x
3:06 PM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 
I recently spent a few days working on a vineyard. Any of you ever done vineyard work ? I thought it would be all singing Led Belly songs in the sun, writing poems on the back of wine cartons and sampling the new rose over smokes in the evening light. 
Actually it was quite a hard long grind in the Essex rain and as Craig pointed out to me this isn’t Oh Brother Where Art Thou but recession Britain in 2009...damn. 
Good fun though and a bit of cash in hand. Thanks for havin’ me down Bobby boy. 
4:10 PM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 

So.….. these new recordings have been a long time promised and a long time coming. It’s a long story and I won’t go into the details. Let’s just say getting this album done is proving a bit of an adventure. I’ve been running round London with the only copies of music on a cheap little hard drive pressed inside my inner jacket pocket - hustling my way around - despeartly trying to find people who’ll have me in their studios - rounding up musicians like the magnificent seven - pulling favors left right and centre.
 Every day is a struggle at the moment to get this thing done. Uploading and editing tracks from Camden to Soho to Ealing. Once this albums done it’s likely to have been recorded in about twenty different studios with as many producers and musicians - every single one of whom I am very grateful too- Strummerville not least who have come to my rescue time and time again.. Bare with me friends. By hook or by crook and with a little luck there will be be some more tracks up soon.  
The minute it’s done I’m moving out to Paris where I plan to live on cans of beans and cheap wine and get writing again. I can’t fucking wait.   
Hard times for us all at the moment I guess- no money, no funding, no deals, no advances, nothin  -  but hell I can’t complain. The sun is shining - bands and new music is fucking flourishing everywhere. Feels like we’re all hovering on the precipice of something big though no one knows what. Exciting times if tough.
I’d be lying If I said I wasn’t having fun. 
Jackie Wilson once said something like -
 ‘ Just cause you can’t see the road, don’t mean it ain’t there’. 
I like to keep that one somewhere in the back of mind these days.
4:09 PM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 
 
I have just spent a great week working down at the Strummerville yard - one of my favorite places to be. I have been painting their new studio which is gonna be fucking ace.  It’s in a sort of box piled up on top of shipping crates - you have to climb a ladder to get up there. Once your up there you have the west way before you , train lines running by with iron cargo carriages and all the crazy sculptures scattered around the Strummerville yard. Sitting up on there covered in paint, smoking rollies with a hot cup of tea .  The sun shines down on all the dudes below working away on the big pink Glasto Cafe while Ska music pumps out of the sound system. What could be better ? This is the best job I’ve ever had. Thanks Trish. Thanks Max.
4:07 PM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 

Im sorry to say that after many heady nights the House of the Holy is closing down for the summer. It’s been fun -  a little weird at times - but always eventful and always raucous. We’ve been pepper sprayed on stage half way through songs . We’ve had to evacuate the building half way through sets. Often we have watched from the tiny cramped stage at the back of Troy Bar’s sweaty basement while the room erupts into flying fists and tables. However mostly we’ve had a hell of a time and made a bunch of new friends.
Coming down into the little basement of Hanway  Street 50’s rock and roll blares from the sterio as we go stumbling to and from the little bar. Juliana the beautiful Brazilian barmaid - now of some fame - dishes out over priced disgustingly sweet beer. We howl away to our favorite bands from the tiny dance floor. We weave in and out of the weird eclectic mix of Troy Bar’s clientel - Brazilian heavies,  dick head city boys out on the pull, girls kitted out in their ninteen forties glad rags, Indie waifs, bearded tramps, ageing punks, drunken Spainards with greased hair, lary kids pissed on the whiskey they smuggeled in under their jackets, bands taking a break between the near constant sets. 
  Up and down the little wooden staircase we run trying to find that girl we were just dancing with - sliding in and out of the  kids who are jiving to old chuck berry songs on the carpeted floor - hoping she hasn’t gone off with one of those guys from the band who were playing in another bar down the road earlier tonight. 
There she is and you grab her by the hand - steer her away from the Brazilian bouncers who are having a confrontation with some skin heads in the corner. You push and shuve your way back down the narrow stairs to where Cheka are tearing up the basement - pounding away at their guitars while Isla Muma Blues strolls around the floor in her pokadot dress. That weird pilled up beareded guy that no one knows is still gyrating on the dance floor while the pretty girls in the trilby hats watch warily from the tables in the corner . Up above those weird blue neon lights are twitching and stuttering away. Then a whole lot of heaving and shuving to get the band off the stage and out the door before they get crushed and then the next ones on and we’re away again. Meanwhile the room reels to Juliana’s selection of obscure rock and roll and the night moves on. Good times.

House of the Holy takes place at Hanway Street’s Troy Bar in Soho. 
It will be back in September.
Bands to have played at Troy Bar are ( in no particular order) - 

Cheka
Molotov Jukebox
The Kooks 
The Handshake
Beans on Toast
Alan Pownell
King Charles 
Let’s Tea Party
Ginga
This is Laura 
Hector Red
Arthur Delaney  
 
If you want to play House of the Holy in September drop me a line. 

X
4:06 PM 
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Thursday, May 14, 2009 
I have been in the studio for the last few months recording 2 EPs I hope Im gonna to release some time later this year, However until then.... I thought I might as well make some of the old stuff available. None of the songs on this page - bar one or two - will feature on future releases. They were recorded with different friends, musicians in differant places over the last couple of years. They are available for one month only on rawrip and then gone forever ! The tracks - Sea Shanty, Everyone Loves B, While the Record Spins, She Gives me a feeling, Stars Lost and Lonely and Maybe Baby, - Were all recorded in the space of a week in our friends little basement in west London - They feature - Natalia Tena on vocals, acordian and piano. Sam Molotov on violin Rob Mavers on bass Henry Danowski on drums The tracks - Lost and Lonely and Maybe Baby Were recorded late one night very drunkenly in the Strong Room studios. They feature - Luke Pritchard on vocals and piano. Max Rafferty on lead guitar and vocals and Massimo 747 on drums. The tracks - Mind Elsewhere and The Devils on my side - Were recorded at Ben Lovett's studio in the course of one sunny afternoon last summer. They feature - Ben Lovett on Piano, Organ, Vocals and Drums. I had a hell of a lot of fun playing with all these fine people. I feel very grateful for all the times.. You can watch my myspace page for newer releases. These tracks will be up for one month only. More to come. I hope you enjoy them. All the best dear friends. Nat x


p.s Look out for ' Train tracks' - a set of songs I will posting soon - they are songs me and Luke wrote and recorded together on trains across the country. 


x

12:59 PM 
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Wednesday, May 06, 2009 

I don’t wanna make any big political statements - I was a little dubious about posting this but just thought i’d share my own little experience of the G20 ‘ riots’. 

I came out of Liverpool street station  at about ten o’clock. The police had already sectioned off the square mile. We were on the other side of the cordon. Some kids had brought down a couple of guitars and people were singing songs, banging traffic cones along to the rhythm, swapping bottles of whiskey and vodka. Two people had brought tents and people were gathered around them.

Then the police moved in. Slowly at first - then running, beating, pushing back with shields. Kids had their hands in the air . Others were shielding their heads from the truncheons and shields that whipped into the crowd.

‘ We’re not fucking doing anything’ we screamed - ‘ we are not a riot’. 

If people weren’t angry before - they were now. If people were unsure of the cause - the police had just given them one.

Take me for example. I’d come down half pissed after a day in a Soho pub - your standard lazy protest tourist - just havin’ a snoop around - taking in the whole spectacle. Now I was irrevocably in. These fuckers had brought me IN. Any cause - abstract or direct - was forgotten and all that concerned us now were the brutes closing in on us from all angels.

For a moment all was suddenly still. Now we stood strong and proud in front of the barricade, suddenly unified. The advancing line stopped and held their ground also.  Then someone from the back threw a can of beer - it bounced ineffectively off the shield of 6 ft 6 giant at the front of the cavalcade. It was the excuse they had been looking for. They charged again.

I went down in the first stampede and feet beat down on my chest. A friendly hand from behind picked me out and scooped me up but a girl had been left behind and was being mercilessly beaten by shields as she tried to cover her head with her hands. We ran back and about five of us suceeded in dragging her away. In return for this we were again pressed back in another charge. Everywhere I heard people cry  out to the police - some in floods of tears - one caked in blood. A girl was wandering around crying trying to find her friend who’d been lost in the crush. 

. A bottle sailed through the air from behind us and smashed on a police helmet. My friend had just appeared at my elbow.  

‘ Stop throwing bottles’ the two of us screamed back at the crowd - ‘ don’t give them an excuse ’. 

Then the two of us - suddenly filled with rage, bursting with adrenalin, went down the line screaming at the top of our voices - 

‘ Sit down ! everybody - sit down !’

The 500 people behind us sunk down to the ground. The police didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t very well just walk right over and crush us. The called back for orders from their superiors. One man next to me was covered in blood and his leg was badly gashed. Some girls behind us were using some t- shirts to bandage him up.  

It was only now I got to really have a look at the faces of the police. They were scared. They were fucking terrified. More terrified then the beaten kids at their feet. Why ? Why ? I thought - standing there in full armor - brandishing weapons, truncheons by their sides, quaking in their big black boots. Some of them knew. They fucking knew they were wrong - worse than wrong criminal - criminals dressed up in the uniforms of authority - and it scared them. They were out of control - not only of the crowd but of thesmselves. I got to my feet and walked down the line speaking to the officers and others did the same. 

‘ Look at us. No one’s trying to hurt you. Pull back. Lower your shields. Lower your shields. Calm down. Calm down,. Pull back’

It was like trying to calm a bunch of scared kids. An oder came through form the back. More and more lines of police showed up. Dogs were brought in - howling, ripping dogs. They were getting ready for the charge. You could see that now.

‘ move back !’  a police woman  screamed -‘ move back! .

But we had nowehere to move - crammed in as were. Then one man - he must have been in his fifties walked down the line and accidentaly tripped and brushed against a police shield. That was it. He was instantly flattened to the floor.  Two people got up to help him to his feet and were beaten down. I rose to my feet also. 

Immediatly two hands reached in from behind the lines and gripped me by the neck. I was lifted out of the bodies. Then my face was pushed to the ground - my arm bent so far behind my back I thought it would break. Dogs reared up and barked all around - straining at their leashes.  I tried to get up and a hand pushed my face into the tarmac. Then I was lifted to my feet and marched to an awaiting police van.

‘ Do you know why we’ve taken you out son?’

‘ No, I said and neither do you’. 

My arm got bent in a little more. Apparently I had been inciting violence - well that’s pretty rich I thought. 

In the distance fires loomed up in the square mile . Up above helicopters lit up the heads of the kids below - all pressed in together like pigs in a pen. Behind me I could hear the cries of the crowd as the police moved in again.


 Talk all you want about the difficulties of protest - over simplified phrases like, ‘ anti- capatalist’ - anarchist, ‘ anti state’- but when the state turns up in armor looking for a fight, when the first truncheon hits you - you know once and for all which side your on.

I’ve been woken up to a lot these last few weeks. I think a lot of people have.

Thank you for bearing with me if you’ve read this far. 

.

     



  

 

4:38 PM 
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Wednesday, May 06, 2009 

Three Days in Paris.

More rambling diary extracts …… 


( March 2009)


I got into Gare du Nord on an afternoon train. It’s always a weird feeling getting off the Euro Star. Two hours sleeping stretched out on a train seat and your in a whole new world.

Where am I gonna sleep tonight ? Where exactly am I ? 

I trawl through my phone book for vague French aquaintances met on passing drunken nights out. I try a few guys from Charlie Winston’s band - their phones all go straight to voicemails spoken hurriedly in jaunty parisian French. Then I try Alex - he’s a guy who came in to Mi7 - where Im recording my single at the moment - to try out on guitar for the band. He picks up right away. He just got in to Paris too - hitched up from the south where’s he’s been staying with a girl he’ s seeing.

‘Sure’, he says. He has a place he thinks I can stay - some friends of friends with a flat way out in the south owned by a budding film director who lives there with his girlfriend and her sister. He says he’ll meet me on the platform of Chatelet. I jump on a metro right away. 

When I get there I scan the crowds pressed in on the platforms but find no sign of Alex. Then I see him - his big bulky figure hunched over his guitar case - a badly rolled cigarette sticking from his lips - his cap pressed down over his tousled hair. We get on a packed out metro and rumble off through the complexed system of French underground lines. Alex tells me about his trip up here. 

He’d gone to see a girl he’s in love with. ‘ I didn’t work out so well’ , says Alex. ‘ For me she is the most beautiful girl in the world ...for me’. He pauses to pick up his ciaggrete which has fallen from his lips and to adjust his little cap which is slipping down over his right eye - ‘ ah...what can you do ? shit happens’. He seems pretty cool about it but I know from the way he tries to shrug it off that it is most definatly not cool. He’d planned to stay with her in Lyon but after a bad night had split at five in the morning before it got light to start the long hitch back to Paris - seven hours by the side of highways. Shit. Poor dude - if that was me I’d be having some kind of crisis - I’d be pulling out my hair and writing bad poetry in some darkened corner somewhere. He just shrugs it off. 

We get out at the other end and walk a good 45 mins through the southern suburbs - stopping to pick up wine and whiskey at a supermarket on the way. Man - I was lucky I hooked up with this guy - I tell him so . He says he’s glad of the company and I believe him. 

We receive a warm welcome at the other end. Our hosts cook us up a hot dinner and we open up the bottles of beer and pass them around. We sing for our supper and take requests while the girls boil up a big pasta. Then the evening is wiled away happily over whiskey and songs and talk and Im sitting there thinking to myself what a lucky dude I am just to turn up here in some strange unknown city and find such good and happy people. 

By now everyone’s getting pretty drunk and Alex wants to go for a ride into town. We pile into the little car outside and the girls run in to a get more bottles of wine. Our host wants to stay in tonight and get some rest. So off we go - Alex at the wheel - me beside him with a bottle, Janice Joplin on the sterio, and the girls in the back - whooping along and beating the roof with their fists. 

We stop off at some pool hall on the outskirts of town and I try unsucessfully to seduce them with my terrible pool playing. I’m pretty drunk by now but I havn’t realised it yet. I wanna go some place where we can dance. Off we go - a little shakily now - snaking off through the back streets in our little tan can - me frantically twisting the dial on the radio trying to find anything but bad French techno. 

We swing round a bend onto the man road that runs through the St. Germain district and straight into an awaiting police van. Suddenly there are torches being shone in our faces. Papers are demanded in sharp stacatto French. Alex is immediately reactionary. The girls are pleeding with him to be calm. Alex spits in rage - is hauled from the car. I get up to protest and suddenly I too have a big hulk of a police man breathing down my neck, his truncehon swinging at his side. They put Alex in the back of the van and take the keys.  They breathilise Alex - he catches my eye from the van and nods encopuragingly. I don’t feel to encouraged. It comes up negative. What the fuck ? yup. Totally clean. The cops can’t believe it. They are seething with rage as they hand us back our keys. Off we go shouting and whooping into the night swerving through St. Germain in a peel of laughter.


Next day I wake up in some kinda disgrace. I don’t what or why but I can feel it. Alex is asleep on the floor. The film director and his girl friend are having breakfast down stairs and they treat me with great frosty distance when I walk in. I can’t find my jeans anywhere and have to wander around the house half naked until reclaim them from under some bed up stairs I can hardly even remember ever being in. I leave as fast as I can. 

Man do I feel bad. I feel really really bad. I mean really bad. I can’t remember feeling this bad for a long long time. I wanna get a coffee but I don’t really have the cash. I just walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Try to walk it off. I walk everywhere - feels like I walk the whole of Paris. I walk till I feel my feet will drop off - round and round notre damn - over and back and forth and cross the river. Finally I find myself a little church and try to get some rest on a pew at the back. This priest walks by and gives a mean look - so I pretend I’m praying. I pretend so reverantl that I fall asleep.

When I wake up the church is locked and it’s dark outside. Someone’s holding what must be some kind of private mass in side chapel. Their singing sounds eirly ethereal. I try the door and it’s locked from the inside. Finally a passing old man in a black suit notices me and lets me out - tutting at me all the while. I just nod and bow my head and play humble and aplogise in my broken G.C.S.E French. 

It must be pretty late. It’s dark and the lamps are lit. I don’t even know which part of town Im in. I check my phone and I have two missed calls from Mavo who plays bass in the band. He just  arrived after a nine hour bus journey. I meet him at Chemin Vert and on route there have my very last money taken from me by Transport Police who claim I have the wrong ticket. 

We go down to Cher George and order a bottle of wine that Mavo pays for with a crisp twenty Euro note. Let’s get drinking - get on top of this cripling hang over. We move down to the cellar - a dark damp cavern 200 years old beneath the street where a party is in full swing. They are playing accordian music while people stamp and stomp form the table tops and devastatingly pretty girls swing and turn and twist in graceful arcs around the floor.

Mavo stands proud in jeans and t- shirt and battered converse while all the elegant parisians in waste coats, shirts and red check neck ties glide around him with upturned lips. I get blissfully red wine drunk and fall in love with every girl in the room. However when me and Mavo take clumisly to the floor the place clears out. Then they start playing the national anthem and the whole place is up on chairs and table tops with hands on hearts hollering away with fierce glee. Gees - you won’t find me doing that to God save the queen. 

We leave and bounce of merrily down the street. This time I really have just fallen in love with a girl but I don’t know If I even remember her name and she disapears off with her friend to get stoned somewhere. I chew Mavo’s ear off about her all the way in the taxi and he has to kindly out up with it. 

‘ Seroiusly man you don’t understand. Im gonna marry that girl - seriously man - I mean it - wait and see man’.We’re on our way to meet Henry - the drummer - he just got in this evening. He’s out in the really seedy district - the one with all the whore houses and strip joints and sex shops - ‘ the sex strip’. 

By the time we get there he’s already seethingly drunk. He’s with a buddy of his from the states - a really good dude - and he’s dancing with a middle aged chubby hooker on the tiny dancefloor of some  otherwise empty bar. The DJ must be about 60. She’s playing early ninties dnace hits to no one and having the time of her life. Henry’s in one of those moods where he wants to bump and grind with the whole world and he’s going up to this DJ and shuving his groin in her face. He has us all in stitches of laughter. We have to leave we’re laughing so much - besides the bouncers starting to look a little mean. 

Henry and Piers have a bottle of rum and we get to walking up and down the strip. Somehow we end up in a karikoi bar where the compere is a crack head with whispy little dreads and mean little blood shot eyes that dart uneasily around the room. The place is filled with a real bunch of misfits. Old men playing air guiatar to synthisied bass riffs while a huge whale of a woman shrieks out Abba songs in a piercing falsetto and off duty hookers swig cheap cocktails under the broken neon lights that flicker above the bar. We decide that we’re gonna do a beach boys barber shop qaurtet - Barbaranne. The  crack head takes a dislike to us right away and doenst wanna put us on. We really get it into our head swe’re gonna do this song. Piers ends up giving this whole spiel and we’re all standing there going ‘ yeh man , yeh !’ and feeling like the most abused and hard done by dudes in the world - 

‘ Look man - we came all the way down here from London just to sing this song and your not gonna let us man ? We’ve been parcticing for weeks. You don’t know who we are man ! We’re like huge in England. You should be paying us to sing in your shitty bar man’.

‘ Yeh ! Yeh !’ we chorus. 

Then everyone’s getting out their wallets and trying to bribe the dude. He suddenly cracks under the pressure. He totally flips. He grabs Pier’s head and beats it into the wall. A drunken scuffle follows and the elderly man singing ‘ Bridge over troubeled water’ falters a little as the room turns to see the commotion. 

Two miniutes later and we’r e back out on the street - our money gone and our rum drunk. We sit in sillence for a while on a bench sat right in the middle of the strip - glaring lights above us read ‘ sexodrome’ and manakins in the window perform simulated acts of oral sex with puppet rigidity. Blinking lighst advertise gruellingly specific acts of sexual intercpourse for sale. We sit sillent. Sullen. Then Henry starts up - 


‘ a bah bah bah bah babaran...a bah bah bah bah bah barbaranne’ 

Then Piers comes in perfectly a third up. Mavo joins Henry on the bass. I find the middle ground - Piers reaches higher for the soprano. 

‘ You got me rockin and a rollin, rockin and a reelin, Barbaranne’

And there we have it - on a grimy bench in the middle of two roads running through Paris’s sex district - at four in the morning - have been beaten by crack heads, propositioned by whores and run out by bouncers - our perfect beach boys barber shop qaurtet - and no one there to hear it but the road sweep on his way back home.      


The next night we played what I can safely say was one of the best shows the three of us have ever played together. We met a lovely bunch of people and bands - sweet girls who met us with flower wreaths - and some of the friendliness people in the world. Thanks to everyone for everything. 


We’ll be back in Paris soon

Much love



    

 

4:36 PM 
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