At rehearsal with a Ghanaian band for whom it is imperative to have two different drummers side by side. There are three brass horn players and I have counted four different patterns of stenciled colour on the walls. The room is filled with people speaking Ga and Twi and pidgin and the carpet is striped. […]
In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green. A man who doesn’t have much […]
In New York I came into 34th St subway station to hear a bunch of dudes playing a kind of washboard bluegrass. They weren’t excellent but they had vigour. Called themselves the Ebony Hillbillies: cute. O you’re from Australia & you wanna make a record? Love to! Later I rang them up. “We’re not lettin […]
Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind […]
I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own? I went. Since I left my […]
Today we will be making a new song, the first towards Cathoel & the New Government’s eventual second album. First album prompted 50s jazz impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford to say, “In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” He was talking about Australia but I have gathered fellow […]
On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy […]
Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home […]
Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time. Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I… Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody […]
What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can’t force treatment on somebody, he says, and shrugs. Meantime he is running the Amy Winehouse Foundation, his income derived from her […]
Found this dim-lit, twinkling little bar in an unexpected quarter of town. All seats were empty and the bar owner and his staff were sat around a corral of lounges playing The Cure and playing guitar. I mean The Cure, as in 1979: doomph/slup/doomph/slup/“Accuracy…” We sat down and the barman quickly flipped for the Rolling […]