October 2009

ROBERT BLY – In 1964, I was somewhat exiled in the school library in the new town of Glenrothes where I lived in Fife, Scotland. There was a great view of a range of hills called the Lomonds and the librarian was a kindly older woman who took a real shine to me, decided that I was an allright kid really, and started shovelling lots of reading suggestions my way – I remember in one particular week I got through Catch 22 and The Caine Mutiny, whilst I could see my erstwhile classmates losing the will to live across the way in science classes.

It was at this time that I acquired an abiding love of Russian and American poetry – the Russian women poets looked over my shoulder and their silver coated phantom breath seeped into my being to give me some kind of lifelong protection – from what, I’m not so sure, and they certainly were not promising to keep me alive, more to die at peace in some fleeting respects, no matter how twisted the rest of my being may be.

And with the American poets, although there was plenty of gold in the work of the women, I was drawn to certain figures whom I later discovered were good friends, or at the very least, shared un sh akable foundations of mutual respect. People like James Wright, two of whose poems I have consequently set to music (ST JUDAS and A BLESSING), William Stafford and Robert Bly. I was fascinated by a Bly poem called POEM AGAINST THE BRITISH and over the decades that followed, looked out for any new work of his that might appear.

In the Nineties I noticed that Robert was giving a talk in London so I bought tickets for the event – I forget the theme, and went along on the evening. I got there a bit early – Robert was already there, wearing a Russian type hat and carrying a battered bouzouki in case. He was in a controlled but heated discussion with the event organiser about how much he disliked his accommodation, and he was being told politely but firmly that it couldn’t be changed. At this time I was living in a large house in Ladbroke Grove with lots of spare room and privacy, so on impulse I went forward and interjected, saying Robert was welcome to stay there if it suited him. Robert and the organiser gave me a ‘who the fuck are you?’ style look – I quickly explained that I’d been reading him since the Sixties, and Robert said he’d come round in the morning to see if it suited him, as he was going to be in Lo nd on for five weeks. This is something I can fully understand – I have hysterics if I dislike my hotel room(s) – it sounds precious, but it’s a neurosis which you acquire after a few decades of living with empty mini bars, the smoky smell of transient despair and toilet stink extractors that make a shattering clang three hours after you’ve wiped your arse and turned the bloody light out.

Robert came round the next day and fell slightly in love with the accommodation arrangement – it was beautifully light and airy with views down to Holland Park Avenue, the Ladbroke Arms, and the dreaded Notting Hill police station. He said ‘I’ll take it’ – we shook hands, and went for a pub lunch. I was appalled to hear of the work he was doing with men, bringing them together in gatherings of up to 100 for durations of anything from a day to a week, telling them fairytales, singing poems, accompanying himself in superb style with his bouzouki playing, being very very funny, and making grown geezers cry tears they’d been waiting to cry for a long time, very often without even being aware of that need. As he talked about it, the Russian women poets crept into my mind and said ‘you’re for it now wise guy’ and I knew it was true – I knew that, already my dream of poetry discussions with this man over an agreeable pint or two of Old Blair’s Iraqi Extremely Bitter, was over, and that whatever Robert asked for in the way of help with his ‘men’s work’ I would be dutifully providing. And this is exactly what happened – along the way, I got to know well great thinkers like James Hillman, Michael Meade, Malidoma P Some, Ginette Paris and Eva Loewe – it was a fabulous time of soul plenty, with a harvest of the hardest tears I’d ever shed – only some of them for myself.

But Robert kept me close, and kept me from harm, because in some ways it was a time of danger, certainly psychic danger. Robert became a source of intrigue for media, and for a year there was a constant stream of demand and request for different forms of access to him and his way of doing things, nearly all of which Robert turned down, or rather I turned down on his behalf, acting as his impromptu press officer. A lot of it was eye opening – media figures with pretty big reputations asking to film events or get some form of special inside info – Robert was having none of it. The whole point of the events was that they were for the particpants and nobody else, so that they could leave the event with something that was theirs alone – a safe harbouring of insight and purpose which had not been sullied by some bastard with a camera going ‘could you just say that again and look over at those trees when you say it’ which they then intended to ridicule in their subsequent TV ‘report’. Any new and good radical idea goes through the process known as ‘the joke, the threat and the obvious’, and standing shoulder to shoulder with Robert through part of this experience was a most scary honour.

As time went by, our relationship became one of planning and swift analysis: with a couple of other guys we set up quite a few events, mainly for Robert, Michael Meade and James Hillman. These took considerable forward planning, the teachers would arrive and there would be intense discussion of the format and content of the particular event. (There’s a worthwhile book by my friend Richard Olivier called SHADOW OF THE STONE HEART which describes this process in lurid and entertaining detail). But always we would return to my home after an event, have a hilarious long Chinese dinner to discuss the lunacies of the duration, and the next morning I would go to Robert’s rooms at breakfast time to talk as he worked his way through a bottle of strong Californian red wine and a plate of grilled lamb chops.

Robert recorded two wonderful poems for my album THE MYSTERY OF LOVE IS GREATER THAN THE MYSTERY OF DEATH – THE GARDEN by Antonio Machado, and CLAY JUG by Kabir. As we walked out of Townhouse studios in Shepherd’s Bush, London after we had recorded his voice, Robert continued an earlier discussion which he had instigated about the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey. I mentioned that my mother had been fond of talking about the Dervishes – it was a conversational motif which I remembered clearly from childhood. Robert listened to this with intensity, and then said: ‘Well, it’s a blessing’.

‘The growth of a man can be imagined as a power that gradually expands downward: the voice expands downward into the open vowels that carry emotion, and into the rough consonants that are like gates holding that water, the hurt feelings expand downward into compassion; the intelligence expands with awe into the great arguments or antinomies men have debated for centuries, and the mood-man expands downward into those vast rooms of melancholy under the earth, where we are more alive the older we get, more in tune with the earth and the great roots.’

Robert Bly – from THE RAG AND BONE SHOP OF THE HEART.

MARTIN

By the time you read this I may have been sacked by Cooking Vinyl, my record company. Well, maybe not, but the point is that even if I was, it would not change the fact that Martin Goldschmidt, boss of CV and me are good friends and have been for many years now.

I’ve known some exotic record company bosses in my time, from the mysterious Nick Mobbs at Automatic Records (he’s the guy that signed the Sex Pistols to EMI) to Michael (‘Lord’)Levy, screw-loose maniac boss of Magnet Records, to the truly legendary Tony ‘Strat’ Stratton Smith, boss of Charisma. Martin is a very different kind of bloke – well, to be fair, for better or worse ALL these people are – ‘different’.

When I first started looking for a record deal after my long enforced lay-off in the aftermath of Doll By Doll, I was letting record companies hear the recordings that eventually formed the mainstay of my classic album THE MYSTERY OF LOVE IS GREATER THAN THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. Reactions were highly varied: Muff Winwood (brother of Steve) at Sony thought it was great stuff and wanted to talk. Funny things put you off, like how about that same time Muff did an interview in which he declared that guitar music was finished – forever. Even little ol’ me could see that that couldn’t be right, so it made you wonder....At this time ex Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey was heading up A and R (artiste and repertoire – the bastards that sign you up)at some impressive company, can’t remember who, and I sent the music to him. He sent me back an abusive standard letter with phrases in it like ‘Sorry! – no Top Of The Pops for you this week!’ I could see how it was funny if you were issuing the letter, but not many folk on the receiving end would have managed a wry chuckle. Years earlier Stiff Records used to send out a hilarious rejection letter which was completely over the top, about how any good ideas you had they would steal and give to other artists that they HAD signed – you really can’t paraphrase it – it was a masterpiece. Feargal’s letter was a pale depressing stab at that kind of knockabout humour. A couple of years later Martin Goldschmidt and me saw Feargal and his mates having a very quiet drink in a pub just after he’d been sacked by the same company. A record of mine had just charted in Germany – I felt a little better.

Me and Martin met quite a few times to talk about working together – in restaurants, pubs and cafes. He was honest about the company being at a low ebb because of the unexpected collapse of the distribution company CV used - in which money owed to CV was lost. But he also talked about a relationship of longevity in which, although I may never sell wild amounts of records (unless something went badly wrong) I WOULD be doing what I wanted to do as an artist with minimal interference from the record company. At this time I had no intention of getting back on stage as a live performer, and Martin talked to me carefully over a long period about how I was probably wrong to think like this, and how it was a trauma which I had to overcome, for myself as much as the company’s ability to sell the records. He was right of course, and I finally got my head round this during a performance at a music business trade fair in Berlin, playing a show in a club called Quasimodo, now one of my most beloved of all venues. Try keeping me off the stage these days....

There was an interesting moment when I actually signed on the dotted line and became a Cooking Vinyl artist. We shook hands, Martin smiled a secret smile, looked me in the eyes and said very quietly ‘Gotcha’...

Since then we’ve had a laugh together (a few tears as well – it’s all part of growing up) in all sorts of nooks and crannies of the world. We went to Midem once (highly regarded music fair in Cannes) and had a high old time carousing in restaurants well into the night with a changing but exotic entourage. After the event Martin took me skiing in the alps behind Cannes at a ski venue called Isola 2000. There was a wonderful moment on the journey up to it, where Martin played me a new Pere Ubu he was about to release. The minibus journey was up a horrible series of hairpin bends. At the top the record came to an end and Martin asked me what I thought. I got out of the vehicle and was violently sick – motion sickness, not the music of David Thomas, but that wasn’t clear as I stood doubled over, dazed and panting in the snow. One night after dinner and a hard day’s skiing on Martin’s part (I sat in the sun for the duration drinking rose and writing masterpieces) a gentleman made the unfortunate mistake of extolling the virtues of nuclear power. In another life Martin was a leading light in CND – his argument on this score is permanently marshalled and overwhelming – I’ve rarely heard such a tour de force of reasoned vitriol.

We’ve had frozen margarita headaches together at South By South West in Austin, Texas, got plastered in the afternoon with Ian Rankin in Edinburgh, and had fierce differences of opinion that lasted too long, but we’ve never spoken to each other disrespectfully, and if we were going to, we would have done it by now. He was there for me as a friend when I went through an awful relationship breakup, and he makes me see him once a season for a ‘career health-check’. He has an ability to say insightful things which really help that he then doesn’t remember saying at all. Once, when talking about album budgets, not just mine, more generally, he said ‘recording continues till someone says stop’ – a real beauty.

I also give him my considered opinion on an array of matters and can always tell when what I’ve said has hit home. He stops what he is doing and sits silently staring into the mid-distance for a while. I find something to do in the meantime – we tend to be in a lovely Iranian cafe in Acton when this happens, so I fiddle with my napkin until Martin has found the mental compartment into which to insert my remark. He is a proper businessman and doesn’t take shit. Many is the person who has thought him to be not much more than amiable and easy-going and found out the hard way just how wrong they have got this. Some years back I was in his home in Maida Vale, London – he had recently been sued by a ‘famous person who shall remain nameless’ and had countersued – and won. I complimented him on his beautiful new wooden floors all through the house.

Referring to his recent victory in court he said – ‘Yes, (person who shall remain nameless) paid for them’.