wise-cracking sonofabitch from Clifton, written a thousand songs, released 3 independent albums, recently moved to Berlin
Australian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Paul Fogarty started writing songs at 15 years of age and has written about 1000 songs since. He has recorded three independent albums of his original songs, ranging from alt-country to new-folk to pop-rock to blues and roots influences, since turning professional in 2001.
All 38 songs from these three albums – Breathe (2001), Stagefright (2003), Born Naked (2006) – have received radio airplay in Australia on dozens of stations and networks from Perth to Sydney to Melbourne to Darwin and all points in between.
Paul never considered being a singer-songwriter as a possible career until he had written hundreds of songs.
“Writing songs was like a daily habit and I didn't give it much thought at all. My girlfriend knew John Butler and had seen his rise from obscurity at the markets in Freemantle and she told me I should play my songs and make a go of it as well. I had already written more than 500 songs by then and I thought: – maybe I am a singer-songwriter after all".
Most of his songs come to him either in his dreams or day-dreams and often even he has no idea what they are about until months or years after they're finished.
“When I was a kid growing up on the farm there was nothing much happening. There were few trees, no mountains, no rivers. But that silent, empty space was a deeply spiritual place to be in. It gave you time to figure out who you are, where you fit in the world, and what you are going to do with your life.”
“The isolation forces you to face yourself. It is overwhelming… anyone who has been there knows that feeling”.
Paul plays acoustic guitar, lap-slide guitar, piano, harmonica, 12 string guitar and foot percussion. More information at www.myspace.com/paulfogartysongs and www.paulfogarty.com
This is a blog I posted a couple days ago... but I found out just now that it was set to private... I don't remember doing that to it... but I might have. So here it is in all its glory...a little tale from across the globe...
They call me a sensitive new age guy. An artist with a highly developed sensitivity and a proclivity toward inclusion, fairness, truth and unity.
Some call me a poet. Some call me a lilly-livered fool with nought to his name but bad debts, errors in pronunciation, poor grammar, and a whole mess of white noise.
I may be meek, but I once killed a man. Beat him to death with my acoustic guitar. I couldn't handle it any more. I could brook his selfishness no more. That's why I killed him. Murdered, in cold blood, on the street next to the cafe where I was playing my guitar and singing. Right there where anyone could see it. Murder. Cold. Brutal. Primal.
But oh so necessary...
I say: "Mur..."
I say: "dered..."
I said: "A oo-oo-oo-weee..."
I said: "Love me love me love me...."
The man I murdered, the first one at least, was a dry old biscuit of a thing. He had hair the colour of sand when he was younger, but when he broke through the self-pity barrier at age 61 his hair went all silvery-grey and his bones began to visibly click every time he lifted his right arm to point at you in accusative tones. His back was done, his feet resembled two sandals stuffed with ten-day-old vegetables. He couldn't see proper, couldn't hear proper, and he was mean as a cut snake.
His dry dead skin used to flake up and peel off when the wind rose just a might. And crows, ravens and scrub turkeys would circle around him at different degrees of altitude. He had no soul, no children, no friends. He was born hating.
He told me I was playing my guitar ok, that was ok, but I was singing too loud. Way too loud for a cafe at the beach. He and his missus couldn't get any peace. They lived and worked down the back, at the end of the lane, on the other side of a huge airconditioning unit and half a dozen or more parked cars and units.
They had huge dark circles around their eyes and looked for all the world like they were waiting for death to come. I, apparently, was scaring death away.
I was singularly driving them mad, he said. He had come to the tourist strip years before to get away from all that noise and entertainment and carry-on.
I said "Bummer."
I added: "That's like going to jail cos you just want to be free. Ain't it?"
When I said this his foundations started to shudder and sway. In fact he didn't seem to have any body, any meat to him, just this frame, made of matchsticks and thin, fragile strips of dry, flakey skin. If I huffed and puffed I was sure I could blow his house in.
As he swayed and shuddered I could sense his little rows of intolerant pine-wood window shutters clattering in the wind, and a tiny puff of ignorant black smoke coughed out of the chimney in the top of his head.
I said: "I am just playing mellow music, singing a few songs, low-key like, to give people a little something extra, a little more real, a little more personal, to remember their stay here at the beach."
He said: "And it's lovely, really lovely, I'm sure." As he said this he put his dry flakey hand on my forearm, as if to reure and certainly to patronise.
I said: "Unless you got a ticket you better take your arm off me."
He then said "" in the middle of his next exclamation and everything else he said or did from that point on withered under the shadow of that word.
That was, your Honour, why I killed him. He was a nasty old bully with a betroot-red face and skin so pale you could see through it at certain times of day with the right contrasting backdrop. And you could see through his frail little rake body too. He wasn't like a person in the end... he was more like an idea.
That's what added to my desire to rid the world of him, your Honour. His transparency. He kept gnawing at me with his short, compacted little buck-teethed words....he sprayed them at me like musket gun pellets. He kept hounding for weeks and months and years.
He had no life left in the end. His whole focus was complaining. He wrote to the newspapers, letters to the editors, attending complaint groups and support groups and doing such volunteer work as would A.) build up his own sense of obnoxiousness and B.) allow him to attack and be miserable around those people he was meant to be helping. He used his volunteer work as a way of securing power. His victims had no chance, they were his captives every time they went in and saw him and his overly-square name badge, his service badge, his lemon-orange neck-ties.
Based purely on his dress-sense I feel totally justified in killing him, and anyone like him.
For too long these miserable vat-brains have been tormenting the young, the vibrant, the creative, the energetic, the optimistic, yes and even the outright happy, with their taunts, their complaints, their harring phone calls, their veiled threats, their ganging up in twos and threes to take advantage of the polite, the social, the kind, the loving, the inclusive, the sharing, the selfless because they know that these people would find it morally abhorrent to ignore even the misguided rants of loners, idiots and Those-With-No-Life.
Your Honour, I stand before you, a broken man among broken men and women. Yes I have beaten this poor aging dolt to death with my acoustic guitar. But he did not suffer any more or less than he would have if I had allowed him to go on living. I have done a service to the community, to humankind, to political-incorrectness and to his wife.
Now that this miserable wretch is gone his wife has bloomed and blossomed again. The years of heartache and negativity have fallen off her shoulders and she has enrolled in yoga-dance cles down the road, and also surf-dancing on Sunday mornings. She has rediscovered her smile, her zest for life.
The old man is gone but he is not missed. I hereby request I be released into my own recognizance and be awarded a Queens Birthday honour for services to music, widowhood and community.
My heady run to number 4 on the MP3.com.au Alternative Country music chart has taken a turn for the worse. Overnight I slid from my peak of number 4 back to number 6. This is serious in a couple of ways.
First, it means I am not in the top 5 where the boys are separated from the men (or, if you like, "where the young women are separated from the women slightly older than them").
That's right... everyone in the top 5 is an adult.
Now that I have slipped to number 6 I have to be physically threatening (again) if I want someone in the music biz to take me seriously. I waited all week at home next to a drawing of a telephone for some bogus journalist from some bogus music website to phone me up and do an interview on me because I am a mover and shaker over at www.mp3.com.au.
But that drawing of a telephone never did ring. It didn't even say "brrrrrnnngg!!" in large bold type. It just sat there, moving only as fast as the universe in which it was drawn, waiting for a stain in the shape of Jesus to push through to the surface and give me something to talk about at parties.
The other way that this slide of two places is serious is it means I can let go of all that pressure that being in the top 5 brings with it. I can slack off again now. I can stop pretending the MP3.com.au chart means something that non-music people just would never understand.
So that new lightness of bearing feels good, too.
The other weird development in the charts is that I have rocketed suddenly to number 18 on the Acoustic charts, remained fairly stable at number 11 on the Country charts and am still muddling around in the low 80s in the Pop & Rock charts.
I am hoping against hope that the Polka charts pick me up... in this crazy cyber world where everyone is part of network of friends that is made up of people who sit home alone in the dark typing onto computer keyboards that will never know the touch of the skin of another human being anything is possible.
---------------------------------------------
Here in Germany they got so many -funny signs you spend most of your waking hours tumbling around in fits of uncontrollable laughter.
One of the first one's I noticed was the name of a small town about half an hour from here. The name of this town, writ in large distinguished letters on a large sign at the entry to the town, is OWEN. It made me laugh when I first saw it five years ago because A.) a friend of mine and piano genius who I used to play some gigs with is called Owen. and B.) It made me wonder what other names of people were also names of towns in Germany. and C.) it is so out-of-place to be surrounded by all these ridiculous German words all day every day and then to see the word OWEN in large letters on a sign on the side of the road.
Ausfahrt Einfahrt Fussganger Flughafen Historischen Innenstädten Moglichkeit Schmerzempfindlichkeit OWEN Bahnhoff Krankenhaus Friedhof ... you get the picture.
It made me wonder, is there a BILL or RODNEY or BRUCE? How many people live in each of them? Do they have lovely historic churches and weekend markets?
But one of my favourite signs is the U-Bahn stairs sign only because it reminds me, every single time, that some people do in fact believe in . The U-Bahn is a largely underground rail system in many parts of Europe and certainly Germany and I find it very cool indeed. The U-Bahn stations are usually underground as well and they could blend into the surrounding chaotic business of built-up areas if it weren't for the gigantic U signs that mark their exact locations.
The best part is the down-the-stairs sign that often appears along with the gigantic U sign. The down-the-stairs sign lets you know that you do indeed have to go down the stairs to get to the U-Bahn station. These signs are simplified cartoon-like drawings of a man in a suit (the hat gives you the distinct impression he is still stuck in the 1950s) sort of half-stumbling down a set of perfect white steps toward what could be a bottomless pit. He seems a little hesitant, as if it's his first and maybe last time, and he seems a little sorry for anything he may have done to offend anyone at giant U land down there below the earth.
If the down-the-stairs cartoon is directly underneath the gigantic U it makes you think for a second that God is sending you a text message.
God: U R going straight down to
..
But if the down-the-stairs sign is on its own it just looks like maybe there is a place down there where you can maybe lean anonymously on a bar and sip a quiet drink while you chew off the barman's ear about women, love, working for the man...
You gotta check me out at www.mp3.com.au because this week I have leapt to number 4 on the Alternative Country charts, and, wait for it, number 9 on the normal Country charts. Not to mention being in the top 100 in the pop and rock Chart. Or rock and pop, or whatever it's called.
I'm joking, of course - not about the chart rankings but about what you should do about it. Don't visit mp3.com.au .... don't do any such thing. Make yourself a hot chocolate, answer your mail, read a book.
I'm so excited about it I could respirate.
It's weird cos there is no activity that I am able to detect. Neither in me nor in mp3.com.au, I mean, none. Zip. No fans. No messages. No reviews. No pulse. Nothing.
So, if there is no activity, then why bother changing the "charts" each week?
I love the stuff you can find on YouTube about all sorts of interesting subjects. My latest favourites are the taped telephone conversations of various former Presidents of the United States of America including one of Lyndon Baines Johnson calling his tailor and explaining some adjustments he needs on his pants cos he needs more room "down where your nuts hang" and also around to the "bung hole"...
Some cool things are happening this week. Like for one, it snowed a couple of times down here in the southern part of Germany where the grandfolks live. We are here over the holiday season, replacing the carpets in the house with Parkett flooring...oh joy...jumping through more hoops so the German government will think about letting me stay in Germany for a while, and taking delivery of the long awaited reprints of my second (Stagefright) and third (Born Naked) albums.
It's been a long wait for that Stagefright album to get re-printed. Two years, really. So we waited til we got to Germany, as it turned out, to get the re-print done. The German-based duplication company were real particular about the whole deal, and we had to get permission from GEMA, the German performing rights ociation, before it could go ahead. We had to fill out seven pages of forms for each album before GEMA would give the duplication company the go ahead. The organisational detail is mind-numbing...
So there was some to-ing and some fro-ing, but finally everything seemed in order. And then the albums arrived here in Stuttgart on Tuesday morning and by Jesus they do look and sound sensational. Like, professional, you know?
Those Germans, they don't do things by halves.
And so now, today, the essential thing that must happen if I am to stay in Germany past tomorrow, finally happened.
I got my residential permit-visa-thing from the Department of Lets-Just-Make-Him-Suffer-A-Little-More-Shall-We and it covers me for three years starting from today.
My wife and I were very cool about recieving it. We were casual, aloof, blase even. We took their advice about whether I should enrol in a German language course and then smiled and bid them farewell. We exited the room, strolled casually down the hallway, went out the door, and then crumpled into a heap on the steps, weeping like long lost orphans who have just been found.
Germany has taken me in.
So we can breathe again. And the air is fresh and filled with snow and it is suddenly lovely and christmy and now we have two shipments of CDs to sell so we can start to put some food into our opened mouths.... that is the stuff of the independent artist, the singer and songwriter and poet. Aaahhh the romance of it...
I have no idea what I have done to suddenly rank number 7 on the Alternative Country Music Charts at www.MP3.com.au but I fear it has something to do with either a.) boredom, or b.) inexact charting procedure.
What's more, I am also ranked number 14 on the Country Music Charts at the same website, as well as ranking in the top blah blah blah in the PopNRock Charts and the Acoustic Charts.
Meanwhile, I have been minding my own business, writing songs, recording demos at home in Berlin and trying to get my head around how North in Germany always feels like South, and South always feels like North.
East, therefore, by natural extension, feels like West and West, you would think, would feel like East. But it doesn't. West also feels like South.
The theory I have arrived at after months of ruminating is that I was born and raised and lived 99% of my life below the Tropic Of Capricorn. Southern Hemisphere. Down there, the sun always remains "toward the north" because it must if it is to follow the line of the tropic of Capricorn and I am living to the south of that same line.
Sure, it rises in the East, but it is to the north-east of where I used to live. And then it would describe a line from North East to North West.... remaining always somewhat to the north.
Now this is simple enough for me to understand but try telling that to people who have lived in the Northern Hemisphere their whole lives and have, therefore, never given it a moments thought.
When Americans or the English move to Germany they don't have to cope with the southern disposition of the sun because it's always been in that general direction to them because they've always lived in the Northern Hemisphere and as long as they've lived to the north of the line of the Tropic of Cancer then everything has always been the same.
So I tell them all that one of my great disorientations with Germany is this South-North situation. I tell them my theory about the Sun and how it stays within the band that stretches from the Tropic of Capricorn in the South to the Tropic of Cancer in the North and how when you move hemispheres this throws everything completely out of whack. But so far, let me count them, no one believes my theory. They think I've gone completely mad and treat me accordingly. They ignore me at parties, they cross the street when they see me out and about. They swerve to hit me in the their cars.
I'm sticking by my theory because it makes sense, and because it never fails. Every time I am lost and don't know which way to go I ask my inner comp to direct me. When it comes up with an answer I go in the exact opposite direction. It is anti-instinctive, it is possibly pathological, but every single time it gets me to exactly where I need to go.
It is the geographical equivalent of the George Kostanza philosophy for a successful life.
My wife and child are at the grandparents place in southern Germany. They've been gone a good two weeks now. I have been to England, played at a gorgeous wedding at Notley Abbey, played a few songs at the Old Red Lion pub in Tetsworth the following day, then flew back to the sleet and snow of Berlin and I've been recording and writing without interruption.
But tomorrow I am back on the A9, the autobahn, south toward Munich, past Dresden and Leipzig, take a right turn at Nurnberg, then the E50 west towards Stuttgart. Builder of Mercedes, of Porsche, and publisher of millions of copies of Christian bibles. ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />
So tonight I stop working and just simply blog. I got a few hours on my hands.
And tonight my thoughts turned toward, somehow, Google Earth. I was watching an Eckhart Tolle interview on YouTube and he was being interviewed by a young guy in a park in Vancouver where Eckhart lives. They showed some of Vancouver and its skirt of gorgeous mountains in the background – that is what made me look it up.
Once I get started on Google Earth though, there is no turning back. I am convinced there is something more to it. Something beyond fact or photograph. Here's what I learned…
The North Pole is a cool placed to inspect on Google Earth should you ever have a few hours up your sleeve. It's cool for a lot of reasons – not least of which is its extreme longitudinal bearing. It doesn't get any further north.
Another reason it is cool, vis-Ă -vis Google Earth, is that it is not locked in by continents of million-year-old ice. It makes the North Pole look like a nice place to visit in spring. Which brings me to the next reason.
The North Pole is not only NOT the home of Santa Claus and his child-slaves, it is the place where Google Earth send bad photographs to die.
Now, when you go to Google Earth and type "North Pole" in the search box it won't come back with the North Pole I am talking about.
It will offer you some other place rather ambitiously, if not fraudulently, named North Pole, Alaska.
It is a tiny town carved into the ice with avenues named by number – 1st avenue, 2nd avenue - because the founding fathers were too busy getting their nuts frozen off and were too cold to think of any real names. There are a couple of French-sounding street names like Therrialt Drive and Lasalle Avenue, but they are plainly tokenistic. There is however a North Santa Clause Lane.
In spite of, or perhaps because of the whole street name thing, houses are cheap. You can buy a two-storey, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom house, for a shade under $70,000 (US). You can also buy two acres of snow in the middle of nowhere for 20 large. Twenty-thousand dollars. Think of it… all the snow you can eat, practically for free, for ever. I ran it through the mortgage calculator on the North Pole Real Estate website and it came back with the following facts: Down payment: $4000, Monthly mortgage payment: $95.00 .
For anyone who works from home over the internet this is an absolute steal. I won't be a bit surprised if the population of North Pole Alaska starts to balloon over the next weeks and months with nervous looking stock brokers and chain smoking banking executives looking for a sea change.
So once you have finished checking out North Pole Alaska you should move on to the real North Pole. You will only find it by physically moving the globe of the earth around with the pointing device until you see the Yellow Rectangle of the National Geographic company sitting over the top of it like a miniature table cloth. It spoils the virgin-like quality of the North Pole, to see it covered over by the yellow rectangle, but it could have been worse. It could have been a set of golden arches.
When you zoom down in towards the North Pole you will notice a few things. For one, there ain't no ice. For two, the ocean at the north pole seems to follow bizarrely symmetrical patterns to form an exact point underneath the yellow triangle. And for three, as I mentioned, you will notice hundreds of misplaced, dead, or dying photographs scattered all over the place near the North Pole. These are the photos that Google Earth staff couldn't be bothered to find a proper place for so they left them around for Santa and his child slaves to pick them up and maybe incorporate them into photo-montages they could give to glee clubs and Rotary clubs to raise money for this, that and the other.
These photos have nothing whatsoever to do with the North Pole, some don't even have anything to do with the Northern Hemisphere. Here are some titles for you to ponder: "Angus Sunset From Kathikas", and "Painting on wall, found during renovations" and "People's Committee in Ho Chi Minh" and "Looking Back On Highway 12".
But all of this pales in comparison to the South Pole, which, when you zoom right into it, like it's dead center in your view finder, begins to take on the shape of a mive, evil eyeball in various states of demonic possession. It is way cool. At certain vantage points it changes its mood, it's shape, its intention, right in front of your eyes. No drugs are required in order for you to extract the maximum benefit from it. It just is.
Almost all of the photos placed at the South Pole are relevant to the South Pole. With one notable exception. That photo is of a place called Correos, which, as far I can tell, is a medium sized church building in the medium sized regional town of Valladolid in Spain boasting moderate temperatures year-round.
And judging by the photograph, Valladolid is almost nothing like the South Pole.
But I've left my favourite Google Earth destination for last. It is Cape Town in South Africa. Google Earth has decided that the ocean swells that slam into the Cape Town beaches from the Atlantic Ocean are so significant that they must be somehow represented in 3 dimensional form by Google Earth (so you gotta make sure you have the "terrain" box ticked on the side). You won't ever get back the hours that you spend being fascinated by these technological glitches but I swear there is something in it. Something intangible. Something that only the human spirit can sense.
Hey. I am starting to enjoy this chaotic output. I just posted a third new song on the music page here. This one is called "Sad Sad Song".
This is one I managed to get a second track recorded on without freezing the recording software program or the lap top. That is me also playing around with second guitar ideas you can hear in the background. It's rough and ready.... but it's exactly what I am aiming for at this stage of pre-production. I'd love to get some harmony vocals down too, but hey, I'll give it a shot tomorrow.
I played at a gorgeous wedding in Thame, near Oxford, last Friday and it was one of those perfect days you know you will never forget. It was perfect for a lot of reasons that even now, this close after the event, it is impossible to write about it.
It was like being in a movie.
Which is not too much of a stretch especially when you consider the locale.
Because this wedding was held at a little spread called Notley Abbey, just down the road from Robin Gibb's house. And Notley Abbey - on top of being eight centuries old, a choice stop over for King Henry VIII, and the venue for Dido's most recent recording sessions (like, the week before the wedding) - is also the former home of Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivienne Leigh.
Did you get that?
I said Larry and Viv lived there. They owned the place. Probably even hosted a high tea or two.
The history of the place hangs around in the air like an enormous group hug. It envelopes you and invites you further in. It is so comfortable it makes you feel like you are in a dream somebody once had.
It was an enormous buzz just to be there. Just to walk through the grounds, to feel the crunch of the stones beneath your feet, to sit by one of the fireplaces, to hear the old place answer you when you spoke or, as I was privileged to do, when you sang a song or two.
----------------------------
Ok, cool. I just did a search for some video on Sir Lawrence Olivier and got lucky with a doentary piece that mentions Notley Abbey, comments by Douglas Fairbanks, and some pics of the place.
Hey, the gig at the Blue Note Jazzclub in Dresden was a very very very very cool gig to be at, and a very very very cool gig to be playing. The people were cool, the staff were cool, the stage was cool, the speakers were cool, the desk was cool, the shape of the place was way way cool, and the stage lighting was exceedingly delicious.
But to see that gorgeous photo of Louis B Armstrong, his cheeks puffed to exploding point, gazing straight back at me from high up on the wall was positively spiritual. That photo made me remember, there is more to music than just music.
It was a gig you are just itching to do all over again as soon as humanly possible. It was a gig that made you think you could really do this for a living and feel fulfilled and happy and nurtured and stimulated and creative and positive and inspired and original and complete for the rest of your freaking life.
But you know the coolest thing? I haven't even mentioned it yet, was the crowd. The audience. The punters. The bodies. The people. The folks. The human beings. The men and women, boys and girls, guys and gals.
They let me play, they let me sing, they let me tell my idle little stories, my lame little tales about stuff, about women and jobs and mistakes and blunders and coincidences and happenstances. They laughed at my little asides, and they waited til the guitar strings stopped vibrating at the end of each song before applauding full and loud and long. I played maybe thirty songs.
And thirty times, at the end of each song, this bunch of orted folks, students and workers and wives and husbands and professors and travellers and sisters and brothers, waited until the last strum of my guitar at the end of each song before bursting out with their applause. But they didn't applaud exactly on the last strum. No.
They gave me and my songs a little bit of space. They waited til the very last sounding notes had died and faded into a deep, mysterious and respectful silence before advancing their applause toward me. And that moment of deep silence was like a deep bow, not from the shoulders but from the hips and it said more about them than it said about me and my collection of little original songs. It was an applause that said: "we acknowledge you." And dude, it was the coolest thing.
Maybe it's a German thing. The waiting until the last drop of vibration has been squeezed from the stage, from the song, but it makes all the difference. As a performer it lets you become more completely yourself on stage.... and that, friends is what it is all about.
I had thirty of those gorgeous moments of ethereal silence that night. Thirty-one, counting my little encore.
That's a whole minute's worth of staring straight into the open face of who I am. And for once, I didn't even flinch.
Ok. So somebody mucked around with the symbols showing where the elephants and their shadows can be found at Berlin Zoo on Google Earth. And being able to see the tops of the elephants in Berlin Zoo, and their shadows, is pretty important to a lot of people.
So I decided to take it out of the hands of freaks who are trying to lead you AWAY from the real elephants and into their questionable dens of iniquity (gotta get Google Spell) and provide you with some facts so you can get there, any time, night or day, and look down at the backs of those gorgeous elephants. And then go south east about a hundred feet where you will find the equally awe-inspiring giraffes and their shadows.
Ok. You go to Google Earth. You type the following in the search field:
52 30 27.54 N, 13 20 7.08 E
and then you just zoom in with the zoom function. You don't move east or west or north or south. Just zoom in. It is, I ure you, way cool.
Here in Berlin we had our first snow of the season today. I can die now. I love the snow with an intensity that I'm sure in some cultures would be seen as illegal.
But I do wonder how the those elephants and giraffes are holding up.
I went to another songwriter's apartment over in Schoneburg yesterday and we played a few tunes, sang some harmonies, it was a blast.
But one of the very coolest things was the fact that his backdoor neighbour, a mive industrial age building that takes up almost an entire block, is the world headquarters of the company that makes all those little yellow freaking dictionaries that everyone in Germany, and possibly Europe, owns ten copies of...one for translating German to Portuguese and vice versa, one for German and Spanish, one for Dutch, certainly one for English, one for French, one for Italian etc etc. The company is called Langenscheidts KG. and they, my friend, are seriously old school.
Call me wierd, but I love seeing the headquarters of places. Cos back home at the beach, you know, there wasn't a headquarters within cooee. In fact, the only headquarters I can think of from Noosa is Hey Bill!
Yes, that is the name. And yes, it has an exclamation mark at the end. And yes, it does operate along the beach, like, on the actual sand, and yes, they do serve cold drinks and crushed-ice cones.
About three blocks from where i live is the headquarters of Bosch. It's cool. Any time you are coming home from someplace along Kaiserdamm you just look for the Bosch tower and turn left.
Four blocks in the other direction is the headquarters of Radio Berlin. It's a huge building, maybe 18 or 20 storeys, but it looks somehow beautiful. And across the road from there is the Berlin Messe or Exhibition/Convention Centre and the Rundfunk Tower.... a radio tower built in 1928 as Germany's answer to the Eiffel Tower. Its cool because anytime you are coming home along the A100 autobahn you just look for the Rundfunk Tower and take the exit.
There's lots of other interesting stuff in Berlin, of course, apart from company headquarters. There's so many statues you can't keep up with them all. Statues of Bismark and Adenauer and Frederick The Great and Immanual Kant and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who as social engineers were ultimately the Betacam and AppleMac in their field. There are also heaps of cool modern sculptures that look like slabs of caramel left too long out in the sun.
Back at the beach the only things that looked like slabs of caramel left out in the sun really were slabs of caramel left out in the sun.
Tonight I listened to a Polish woman giving a talk about one of the regions of Poland, its shining points, its highlights, its apparently brilliant year-round sunshine, its abundance of smiling, friendly people itching for an excuse to give you the shirt off their back.
The woman began saying just a single Polish word at approximately 6.22pm and she didn't finish that word until almost 8.00 o'clock.
It was an astounding feat. I mean, she didn't draw breath. If she did, she used the double-breathing technique mastered only, or so I thought, by Australian aborigine didgerido players and central American nose-flute players.
The word this young woman uttered was polish, of that I have no doubt, and contained something in excess of 18,000 syllables - for I gave up counting at 7.33pm.
The people in the audience were also Polish and they understood every nuance, every non-breath, every "ussshhh" and "orski" and "prahrananansk" not to mention all those Polish words that are too deep to be found on the standard treble clef of so many other languages.
Yes, my friends, it is true - much of the polish language sinks down past the throat, past the chest, through the solar-plexus and nestles below the hips around which it does loop-de-loops through the pair of reproductive sockets found deep within the pubic girdle.
And these syllables, vowels, consonants and utterances can be found only on the b clef... along with Barry White ringtones and the mating cry of the Great Blue Whale. They are not shaped like dots, like normal musical notes. No, they are shaped like strands of DNA, like sophisticated pasta strands that have been privately schooled, and they dangle around the area of triple low G like fish in a trawlers net, waiting for either liberation, lunch, or both.
Here's another song that is too lazy to make its own way in the world. I wrote it but I ain't bothered about it.
In the head space that I populate if I didn't write these kinds of songs down and catalogue them they would clog up the creative arteries of the universe and at some point, some how, somewhere, some other songwriter would have to wrestle with the same inspirational bundle all over again.
This one is called:
Far From The Truth
((c) Paul Fogarty, 1992 (yeah, it's been hanging around for a while, I do play it live, but I just can't record the thing. It won't let me...it always sounds crosseyed when I hear it back cos there's a couple words I HATE and I can't for the life of me get them right.)
Love me today for tomorrow I sail away
love me today every dog must have his day
don't let your heart run dry
just because I could not stay
don't treat me like a child
this child will not obey
(chorus) Don't treat me like a stranger
do not throw me from your roof
don't tell me I'm your enemy
you know its far from the truth, far from the truth
(2) Love me today for tomorrow I sail away
love me today, every dog must have his day
don't let that sad feeling turn you into a pile of stones
don't let that thought be keeping you
from a love you've never known
(repeat chorus)
(3) Love me today for tomorrow I sail away
love me today every dog must have his day
don't let that sorry situation leave you crying yourself to sleep
Now, I wrote that song for a girl from Tasmania who said she was also a mad writer and I was nuts about her. We met at the Journalism degree course at University in Brisbane, which is where I lived. Now Tasmania is about 2000 km from Brisbane so that is the reference to "Other side of the nation". I considered her an absolutely clear crystal (which obviously tripped off the line about "pile of stones") and next to her I was just an absolute dog. Anyway, we did get together and she was initially supportive of my song writing and my prose writing ("you're writing is great, you have GOT to get published, AND you have GOT to do something with those songs of yours!!!"). But after a couple months she came at me with the line everyone comes out with sooner or later:
Her: "Why do you have to write so much all the time?"
To which I replied: "That's what I do. I have this compulsion to write. You're a writer. Don't you have it too?"
Her: "Not at all..."
....and it was at precisely that moment that the realisation dawned on her that she was not, in fact, a mad writer. Here she was living with one all of a sudden and the idea of being a mad writer was not, after all, such a romantic one. (I use the term "mad" writer as an abbreviation of "mad keen" writer.)
So we had some arguments that ended with her calling her father on the phone in Tasmania and him telling her that maybe I was right and we should just call it quits and move right along, take our separate paths. So we did.
It's official. Neil Young has broken the MySpace record for the Friend Requestathlon. His time of 0.0001 seconds is faster than the speed at which the universe is expanding and proves my theory that Neil Young is already friends with every lifeform in the Milky Way.
I sent him a friend request at 10.04 this morning and got his approval at 10.04.0001 am. It was like he was waiting by the computer for this chance all this time... and I didn't even know it. Or his MySpace site friend request approval is entirely automated.
Either way, for me it was an historic feat. Cheers Neil.
Ok. So I remembered to go to Kaisers before they close at midnight. I got the butter, the cheese, the bread, the Maltesers. Mmmmmm.
Here in Germany, of course, there are two kinds of Maltesers.
Here is what Wikipedia says about both:
Malteser International is the worldwide relief agency of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta for humanitarian aid. The organisation covers around 200 projects in about 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Currently, 19 national ociations of the Order of Malta are members of Malteser International.
Evolved from Malteser Germany, therefore set up in accordance with German Law, and internationalized as the Order of Malta's relief service in 2005, the organisation provides aid in all parts of the world without distinction of religion, race or political persuasion. Christian values and the humanitarian principles of impartiality and independence are the foundation of its work. Malteser International has the status of a Non-Governmental Organisation.
Its mission is not only to provide emergency relief, but also to implement rehabilitation measures and to facilitate the link between emergency relief and sustainable development. Malteser International establishes and promotes primary health care services and seeks to reduce vulnerability and poverty. It is committed to ensure high quality standards. Accountability and transparency are priorities of its agenda.
Maltesers consist of a spherical malthoneycomb centre, surrounded by milk chocolate. They are most popular in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.[citation needed] Maltesers are sold in a variety of packaging, including plastic bags (ranging in size from small 'fun-size' upwards), larger cardboard boxes and tubes, and plastic buckets (ranging in size from medium to very large).
Maltesers were invented by Forrest Mars Sr. in 1936, and originally known as "Energy Balls".[citation needed] The current name is a portmanteau of the words "malt" (one of the main ingredients) and "teasers."
The current Maltesers' slogan is "The lighter way to enjoy chocolate" - earlier slogans have included "The sweet with the less-fattening centre", "No ordinary chocolate" and "Nothing pleases like Maltesers". The Australian version also contains the line: "Made in Australia... ...exported to the world." In the 1930s, advertisements claimed that Maltesers were beneficial for weight loss[citation needed].
I thought it would be cool to post the lyrics of some songs that, I can almost guarantee you, will never see the light of day on any album....at least none that I will be recording.
Not that the songs are bad (I write lots of dogs but they are in a whole 'nother category). It's just that they are somehow not the direction that I, as a singer-songwriter, choose to go in. These songs insist on being written and they don't care who writes them. So for the good of the artistic community one has a certain responsibility to write a certain number of songs that might not contain any benefits at all for the writers of those songs. They are songs that, once written, are immediately discarded out of nothing more or less than efficiency. They're cool, they just ain't somehow right.
Here's the first one. Soon as you read it you will understand what I am going on about. Or not. It's a personal thing.
Now, what inspired me to write this song is vague as all . Some people ask me, why leave Australia. They also ask, what is Australia like? So that is enough to kick me into songwriting mode and here is the song, and the answer (s)..
But there is enough in it for me to bother to write it down and keep a track of it and work on it over the months and years. In more skilled hands than mine it could be a knockout song. My job then is to get better at what I do. Like any craftsman, like any sculptor, painter, candlestick maker.
In this way, with this way of working, I never ever ever ever ever run out of work to do. I never get bored. Always so much to do. And only so many Maltesers to go around.
When it rains in Berlin even the outdoors seem indoors.
Feels like you are a mammal exhibit in some weather-controlled habitat in which it is constantly raining and cold and groups of aimless, pimpled teenagers are giggling at you from the other side of a two-way mirror.
But why should it feel like you are indoors when it is raining?
I'll tell you why.
Cos the rain doesn't fall directly onto the ground in Berlin.
(Ok, maybe 'ground' is an optimistic term..... lets call it 'rocks in varying degrees of pulverization' because that covers 'bitumen', 'pavement', 'concrete', 'cobblestones', and the 'autobahn' which, singularly, was built by alien life-forms using alien materials that allow Pats and Kombis to travel faster than the speed of light ... which also explains why so few German drivers ever get caught out by red light cameras....the camera flash never reaches the same speed as the number plate of the vehicle it is trying to help photograph).
Like I said, the rain in Berlin doesn't fall onto the actual ground. No. It falls onto the rooftop of the gigantic arcing dome of smog-candy that shelters the city from the healthful and warming effects of the sun, the wind, the atmosphere, and the air.
The smog-candy umbrella soaks up all actual rainfall like a meteorological camel hump. This ensures that it can then hang around and make everyone in Berlin (and its immediate surrounds) miserable for months on end.... long after the rainy season has moved to southern India and Vietnam where it will suffocate millions in mive mud slides and suspend cricket test matches for hours.
So if the pure, natural, real rain falls into the smog-candy hump, then what sort of rain is it that falls on us down here at ground zero? That is acid rain or one of its variants. Maybe it's alkaline rain. I don't know. I don't have the qualifications behind me to say for sure. All I know is that it freezes at 10 degrees ABOVE freezing. So when the air temperature is 10 degrees celsius, the rain is -near ice. It's molecular structure alters as it pes through the smog-candy hump. Maybe it vanishes through a black hole to the far end of the universe and instantaneously returns with a new set of bizarre chemical and molecular characteristics....sort of like Mickey Rourke. I have been out on my regular bike tours around Berlin these past couple of weeks and believe you me, it is freaking cold out there in the indoor-outdoors.
It gets dark at about 4.22pm. It gets light at about 9.07am. It takes an hour and a half to get dressed.... the water-proof socks, the cold and water-proof-but-breatheable boots, the wind resistant jeans that aren't long enough to suck up the ice-acid-rain from the pools it waits around in on the pavement - cos baby, if you step near one of those suckers with jeans that are a centimeter too long, within five minutes your knees will be soaked and your hips will snap-lock.
I rode right along Kant Stre yesterday, into the blinding wind and acid-rain, through tonnes of exhaust fumes and floating sulphur particles, past Kant Cafe, and Quasimodos jazz club, and ended up overshooting my goal turn around point. I don't know where I ended up exactly, or how I ended up there, but it was scary to be so far from home, soaked up to the hips, my hands frozen solid onto the handle grips, and my bad knee screaming blue murder.
Eventually I got home and dried off in the bathroom where the temperature was 109 degrees thanks to the kilometre of heating pipes coiled around the building.
Then later that same day I drove the Megane to my little showcase gig and I measured how far I had ridden on my bike tour. 13 kilometres. Took me an hour and a quarter on the bike... almost all of it, astonishingly enough, into a headwind that seemed to oppose me, personally, whichever direction I rode in.
But you know the best way to describe the indoorsness of Berlin in this current weather was a small, simple incident that happened to us two days ago. We were out driving around, looking at some housing land out past Spandau, past Wedding, past Tegel, somewhere out there, and we ped through a long tunnel on the way to our destination.
But the thing was, we didn't notice we were in a tunnel. It felt like we had fallen asleep and were having a joint dream.
We drove and drove and then after a few minutes we exited the tunnel into the outside world but it felt like we were going into another room of the same tunnel. Only way we knew we had been in a tunnel and were now not in a tunnel was that the windscreen wipers automatically started up when enough of the windscreen's surface was peppered with alkaline rain.
That, my friends, is the best way I know of to describe the indoorsness of the Berlin outdoors when it is raining and covered by the smog-candy dome.
So I drove to Stuttgart on Tuesday. That's pretty much the other side of the country from Berlin. Approximately 640 kilometres. The first 620 kilometres took about 6 hours including a coffee stop, a french fry stop and a phone call stop. I put some fuel in the car ..s one and three. The fuel tank holds around about enough to make it the whole way but it was empty when I began and I filled her right back up again about 30 kms out of Stuttgart.
It was that last 20 kilometres, dude. Took seventy-five minutes. It killed my stats. I mean, there was a lot of roadworks in between Berlin and Stuttgart that slowed progress a ways, but nothing ate into the overall time than that last traffic jam. It didn't seem like a traffic jam. It seemed like a car park. Like a car park in the pouring, freezing rain. Seemed like there were 118 lanes of traffic all parked in the same general direction - every brow a corrugation of worry.
Every knuckle that was wrapped around a steering wheel was white and ligamentous.
Now, much of the time here in Germany it feels like you are not so much driving around a developed country in the free world as circling a gigantic car park looking for a free spot so you can take a leak. But the Germans are so organised that when the traffic jam finally sort of broke up under the weight of its own momentum I ended up parked outside the front of exactly the right house in exactly the right suburb in exactly the right street.
The rain was so insistent, the traffic so unrelenting, the white-knuckles so luminescent, it took me a good half hour to realise I was no longer in the traffic jam but rather outside the in-laws house. Much of the traffic jam had come along with me and sort of dissengaged only at the last second. The kind of organisation required to achieve this feat is beyond my ability to comprehend.
In Germany there are so many people in such a small area of land that every time you have the idea of going from this point to that point over there somebody else has just had that same idea slightly before you and that point over there is no longer that point over there but rather a non-point obliterated by the presence of that self same person.
That's why they need to be organised. If not you would see thousands upon thousands of cars all piled up on top of eachother and thousands upon thousands of people all climbing over the top of eachother and going to the same shop at the same time, and driving around the same corner at the same time and giving birth at the same time, and dying at the same time, and crossing the zebra crossing at the same time.
Occasionally, of course, an unknowable factor will screw things up... like the rain storm on Tuesday evening. But underneath it all the organisation keeps functioning, like the belly of a mive volcano, keeping the engines running.
Okalley Dokalley. I figured it out. Took me best part of five days.
I wanted to set up a little studio while the wife and bub are in Stuttgart visiting with grandma and grandpa and work on some songs and record some demos, or at least, get the software up and running on the laptop, and try to get something approaching a clean sound.
The computer I used to use, back in Australia, was a desktop computer and it had Cubase and Wavelab and it was all hunky dory. No problemo.
But that computer is on a boat bound for London, and then will head on another boat to Hamburg, and then will sit on a train or a truck to travel to Berlin and it won't get here til some time in late November, early December.
FFS. (For F*cks Sake)
So....oh yeah, and the software recording and editing programs are also on that same boat.
So I tried to download some freeware or shareware multi-track home recording software but it was all e. So I went down to the local MediaMarkt here in Berlin and I went to the software section and low and behold they had a couple of cheap multi-track recording programs. I checked everywhere on the boxes to see if there was any mention of optional languages or English versions, but I couldn't find any mention of it. Cos, you know, all the writing on the boxes was in German. (go figure) Then I thought "Hang on. It's a modern world. English is THE information technology language of choice. Of course they will have an English language option so I can find my way around the program, once it is installed, in my mother tongue."
So I bought this program called Magix Samplitude Music Studio because at least the title of it was in English.
But when I got it home and loaded it on the computer there were no further English words. No English language option. No English language instructions. No English language troubleshooting facility. No English help function.
Nil.
Nada.
Zip.
So it has taken me four days to sort it out.to the point where I have been able to record a few new songs, a few old songs, and mix them, and give them a haircut and export them as MP3 files so I could upload them onto sites like this one here at MySpace, and also at SoundClick.com
Soundclick is the first facility to have my new little tracks becaues MySpace has failed to take them. Maybe they are having a long weekend.
Anyhoo... if you click back to my profile page here you will see the SoundClick media player on the left side of the page and you will see the song "Hole In The Sky" which I wrote a couple days ago, recorded yesterday, and uploaded just now.
Sting does not allow bands or musicians on MySpace to send friend requests. He has closed the door on all of us in that respect. So if you wanna be Sting's MySpace friend you gotta do it from a non-musician MySpace page.
I already am Sting's MySpace friend. It makes me feel warm and kind of tender. Oh yeah, and completely delusional (that's how come I fit right in wherever I go).
So you won't see Sting's name in my list of MySpace friends here on my musician/band page. No.
You will see Eric Clapton's name in the list, though. Not that Eric is any more or less friendly than Sting. Eric has an automatic response set up at his end of the MySpace universe. You can befriend him, sure, but the approval comes back so quickly....like before you can click back to your own profile... that you are forced to recognise that a machine has befriended you... not Eric, not even one of his helpers.
It was a computer code that gave the approval. It came back with a speed only matched in deep space where there is no air and therefore no drag.
Getting the response so quickly was a drag though. Oh yes. Slow hand sure made quick work of me.
Here in Germany, I am told, a lot of songwriters forward their songs to copyright lawyers so they can, if the need ever arises, prove that the songs are indeed theirs (the songwriters' that is, not the lawyers).
Which is different to Australia where the simplest way of keeping a record of your creations is just to put them into some digital form on the computer. Personally, I don't want to pay some dude good money just so he can put my songs in a file on his computer. I can do that myself... for free.
What I thought might be cool is to post some of my song lyrics on MySpace, right here, in my new music page (the other page with the history of a quarter million words worth of blog is at myspace.com/paulfogarty).
This will serve a number of purposes, should I be able to keep it up. For one, it will give me a record of my song lyrics ( which I don't really have... most of the songs are still just in my head, or on bits of paper scattered across two continents and on a boat bound for London). For two, it will give my fan/s (hi Mom) a chance to figure out for themselves that most of my songs don't, in fact, make much sense at all. For three, it gives me a digital and world-wide record of my song lyrics. For four, it might even allow some folks to write to me and say "hey, you stole that line from such and such...."
The only line I ever consciously stole/borrowed from someone was from a Bob Dylan and a song of his called Tomorrow Is A Long Time. It's not a line, it's a phrase "silver singing river". I included that phrase in a song of mine called "So Afraid To Fly" and I included it as a humble tribute to Bob. In my song I wanted to refer to the song Tomorrow Is A Long Time but it just didn't fit and even if it did it would have sounded corny. But "silver singing river" fit perfectly (in my world) and .... why don't I write out my song so you can see, maybe, what I was shooting for.
I hardly ever play the song live because I simply forget to sing it. Even if I do draw up a set list it doesn't ever seem to make it on to that list.
It requires a kind of swinging, claw-action, percussive finger plucking technique in which you either have to completely avoid the G string, or, you have to tune the G string down to E. The A string drones on throughout the song and if you tune the G to E then that E plus the high E also drone on throughout the song.
But hey, you know, it sounds kinda cool. If you leave one of your songs alone for just a short while they no longer feel like you wrote them anyways... you just feel like a telegram boy for the universe. A postal worker. A mail sorter. A taxi driver. Like somebody who gets things from point A to point B.
And when that happens, well, the whole world and your whole life in it starts to make a little more sense.
I got a very cool idea to help the airline industry make more money, thereby enabling them to pay their aircraft mechanics and maintenance people a decent wage, and also allow them to have the parts they need manufactured to their exacting standards by people who are actually qualified and skilled, thereby preventing any more of the great silver steel birds from falling from the sky and killing everyone on board.
The idea is as simple as it is ingenious.
I got this idea just today while sitting in a mage-chair lounge at Wilmersdorfer Arcaden here in beautiful Berlin. The arcaden (arcade) is about 600 metres walk from our place so we go there, usually, on foot or on pushbike. Today we went on foot. Me, my wife, our 18 month old bub, Bonnie (otherwise known as TMBGITW, or simply: Themostbeautifulgirlintheworld).
These mage chair lounges are just about the coolest thing going. It is so Jetsons. It is so Star Trek. So Thunderbirds.
Wilmersdorfer Arcaden has eight of these mage chairs all lined up beside each other slightly inside of a very narrow room with a very wide front to the arcade. So every body sits there, in their mage chair, side by side, watching the arcade shoppers walking by.
You are not supposed to watch the shoppers go by, though. No.
You are supposed to be so inside your own private bliss while the mage chair does its magic that you have your eyes closed and beneath them you have this enormous half-moon smile plastered across your ectstatic face.
I was sitting in one of these mage chairs today and after a couple of minutes I thought to myself: "They should serve drinks. I am kind of parched."
Then a couple of minutes later I thought: "And finger food would be just the thing...right about...now."
And then, after about six minutes of my ten minute sit I suddenly thought: "Where are the hot, moist mini-towels like they have on all Asian airlines?"
And that, friends, is when it hit me.
All the airlines have to do to make a profit is install mage chair technology on every chair on every flight longer than, say, 10 minutes.
The 10 minutes in the mage chair costs two Euros. The airlines don't even have to ask for the money up front themselves, they can install the mage chair technology and right along with it they can install the coin machines on each one as well. Shouldn't be too hard squeezing the two-Euro coin slot right in there alongside the headphone jack, the tv remote, the fold-out tray-table, the fire extinguisher, the oxygen mask, the vomit bag, the magazine rack and the seat lean adjustment knob.
Just think of it. A jumbo jet packed full with 280 mage-smart chairs. There is no extra leg room. No extra width for comfort. Just a two-Euro coin slot waiting to be fed every ten minutes and a change machine next to the toilets in back. Those 21 hour flights from Australia to Frankfurt or London or Paris need not be so arduous after all. In 21 hours of flying you could fit 126 separate mages. By the time you land you would no longer have a recognisable skeleton. Certainly you would no longer have a recognisable wallet....cos buddy, all your cash would have been swallowed by the mage chair. That's an extra $252 on top of the $2200 flight. Multiply that by 280 seats and you got some real play money.
With the mage chair turned on you would also immediately irradicate the irrational fear of flying that many people have. Nothing makes you forget your troubles quite so fast as a set of four, German-engineered roller balls doing figure eights, criss-crosses and giant one-arm sukaharas across your back while you are rocketing across the stratosphere at 38 000 feet, at 1000 kilometres per hour, with outside air temperatures around the minus 55 mark.
Your low moans, of course, would be completely camouflaged by the torrential thrusting of the mive rolls royce turbines on each wing.
So that is my idea. P it around. Test it out at social gatherings. Run it up the conversational flagpole and see who salutes.
Berlin Zoo is like another planet, another world. I can't say enough about it. If you ever get the chance, move in there and invite me over for the summer. I will come.
I just realised, like, just now, that you can see the elephants AND the giraffes in Berlin Zoo on Google Earth.
You just type in the following in the search line on Google Earth: "Elephants, Berlin" and it gives you a few options. Double click on option C. THen when you see the little balloon with the letter C come up on the google earth satellite image screen, double click on that and it takes you down over the top of the elephant pen. It's great!!! I love it.
Then you go about 40 metres East-south-east and you will see the GIRAFFES. But even more cool than that, you will see their shadows. The long necks, the understated elegance....
I mean, you can really see their shaaadoowwws.... it is soooo coool
Ok. Now THIS particular MySpace site of mine has gone unutilised almost since the day I opened the account back in 2006. It remained unused cos I had already set up another two MySpace pages a couple of months earlier and I had no idea there even was a MySpace musicians thingamajig.
I was far more interested in writing my observational humour/satire pieces into the main MySpace pages I had set up.... the aim being to get back into a kind of prose-writing fitness.... so I could see if there was any kind of book or series of pieces or even writing voice that was going to emerge over the ensuing months and years. Cos, you know, I love to write stuff.
So the music site here at MySpace that you are now viewing never got off the ground. Oh I kept on doing my gigs, writing my songs, even relased an album in the meantime, but the writing of my observational and narrative stuff took place separate to that. I put on some other hat to do it. The blog on the other site at www.myspace.com/paulfogarty did pretty well and continues to and it has been a great way of developing my writing muscles.
But now I gotta try to merge or at the very least, strongly link, these two sites together. I have tried to find out from MySpace if there is a simple way of merging both types of sites but I haven't gotten a satisfactory response so far.
So that's why the numbers here are pretty low, and why nothing has happened here on this site until the wee hours of October 2008. Ok?
I hope you enjoy the songs. I hope you will enjoy the blogs that are to come. I got 250,000 words of blog material on the other MySpace page... so if you want to have a read, feel free to do so.
This shake down of my MySpace pages comes at a time of restlessness in the lives of myself and my wife and child. We have just last month moved from the quiet, sleepy coastal fishing village of Cooroibah in Queensland (near Noosa), to live in the enormous and exciting cosmopolitan city of Berlin, Germany.
Soon as we catch our breath you will be the first to know...
Ok, this is the regular thing with singer songwriters I guess. The constant roller-coaster, the endless up again and down again, the highs and lows, the ebb and flow. Being cool, not much to do except write songs and record and navigate all the amazing OPPORTUNITIES the internet has to get you lost inside of it....doing all that down time kind of stuff - it sort of is relaxing, like a moving meditation, a moving kundalini feast.
And then, when the concerts get close, when they start circling above you, up in the sky, like vultures with idiot grins (that's how they appear in the dreams anyhoo), you start to get, like I say, a little antsy.
You start to get nervous. The surface area of your skin triples....just from the appearance of so many goose bumps, goose flesh. Yeah, and maybe a few feathers pop out in public, like when you ain't looking. Sure. A few cracks start to appear in the finely manicured facade.
And soon, with just a couple of sleeps to go, those cracks in your facade will be on display, for everyone to see. So you have a little inner battle going on. You kind of want everyone in the known universe to be there (except maybe Kerri-Anne Kennerly) (wow she IS powerful...the computer screen just blacked out when I typed her name....uhghuhghoghorghgh) but you also just wanna run away into the hills and live in a cave with some blind and deaf monk who doesn't care if the chorus is catchy or not, or if its overly commercial, or if its too long for radio.
Yes. Sure. That's the roller coaster ride baby.
TWO MORE SLEEPS
TWO MORE SLEEPS
Better iron that skin back down into a more socially presentable surface.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
12:38 PM - Speaking of Kooks in the 'Music Biz'...
That dude in the green room at last Saturday night's gig (see previous blog posting) reminded me of, oh, I'd say about 11 hundred thousand million people I've met before who hang around the 'scene' when you are doing live music or recording or whatever. It's so cutting edge...
Reminds me of the guy in Sydney who wanted to be my manager and take me TO THE TOP. If I would just record some demos in his new studio which was also cutting edge but the only slight hitch was it wasn't finished yet but I could be 'the first cab off the rank' and he could get all his 'contacts' at the major labels and publishers to circulate the demos around and 'create a buzz' and get my songs into the right hands. It wouldn't be cheap, it would cost a lot of money, but if I wanted to be serious I had to think of it as an investment.
I said: 'If it's an investment, and you feel my songs are worth investing in, then why don't we both invest in them, and maybe we could find other investors?'
At that point the lines of communication began to break down. He had other projects, other investments in other artists, wasn't sure he could stretch himself. Etc etc etc.
I said: 'But if we cut the demos in your home studio, it won't cost much at all, will it?'
He said: 'You gotta get exactly the right musicians, the right arrangements, and they don't come cheap. And you gotta get everything organised...'
I said: 'What do you mean, the right musicians?'
He said: 'Big names. You gotta get the big names on your album, otherwise no-ones gonna want to know you.'
I said: 'But they would be demos. Surely if the songs are good it doesn't matter that much what the names of the musicians are, does it? Besides, what about your contacts at the labels, at the publishers?.....'
And it eventually just kind of fizzled out and he made a hasty exit.
I was just asking questions cos I wanted to know. I was working as a journalist at the time....that was my day job.... and I genuinely wanted some answers to the questions that popped into my head about how the original music thing could possibly work. Cos I wanted to do it....I wanted to give journalism the flick for a while and concentrate on doing original music, playing gigs, recording albums, doing radio spots, getting reviewed, playing showcases and festivals....all that stuff.
And I didn't know squat. But after this incident (in 1999) and a couple of others like it, I realised maybe I should just do things the way I wanted to do them. Make my own mistakes, but not give over the power to anyone else unless I really understood what was going on and what the consequences might be and unless I wanted to hand over control and direction to somebody else.... I realised I would have to, above and beyond everything else, be able to trust them with my whole heart and soul.
Richard Clapton slayed them all at Joes Waterhole at Eumundi tonight. Almost half the gig was encores. Joes was packed out and everyone and their dog was singing along to almost every single Clapton song. Unbelievable and inspiring.
My good self and Jay Ray on lead guitar opened the gig and the crowd was really one of the best crowds I think I ever played to on the Sunshine Coast. Close to it, if not the best. And we got a great response from all the Richard Clapton fans... even did an encore.
Thanks everyone who was there, and thanks for buying the CD.
Thanks also to Dan Lyons, and to the sound guys.
Big wobbly one to the Mover-And-Shaker dude who came back stage before the show and started talking to us and was acting all keen and enthused and stuff, I mean his PUPILS were dilating, and then, when he found out we WEREN'T with the headline act, he suddenly tensed up inside and went all cold. I mean, the whole ROOM went icey cold. And it was like his face crashed in on itself... it was pretty funneeeee how fast he switched off. Ya KOOK!!!! Go rain on yerself.
Huge hugs and kisses to Jay Ray his good self. Can he play guitar? Hey, does the pope have lips? He plays and it makes me cry with sadness and joy and hope inside, all at the same time. And that's even when I am playing with him on stage. It don't get no better. No sir.
It doesn't move. I mean, this is a tiny little coastal resort village, right? Noosa. Queensland, Australia. We don't have any socceroos here but , we'll claim 'em all.
Tiny little place. I think there's 11 cars. 22 roundabouts, but only 11 cars. That's two roundabouts to every car.
So why do they move so slow? The cars, that is. Why does it take a week to drive to the post office? Why does it take another week to get to the front of the line.
Even if there's 10 cars taking up every single car parking spot outside the post office, it still shouldn't take THAT LONG to move from the back of the queue, to the front of the queue. By the time I get outside again I have forgotten who I am.
I mean, they KNOW it's gonna take that long otherwise they wouldn't have in-flight movies playing. And hostesses, they got hostesses, walking serenely up and down the queues (there's actually two queues, just to rub it in your face) offering people pre-packaged meals in rectangular foam and plastic containers, like straight out of the 70s, with their hair tied back so hard it makes their eyeballs leap out and knock the wind out of your chest when they see you.
'The Chicken or the Fish, Sir, the chicken or the fish?'
and I say: 'I just wanna stamp, that's all. Just a stamp.'
They say: 'That won't get you through. You gotta have your carbs.'
I say: 'Ok...I'll eat the stamp when I finally get it...OK?'
They say: 'The meals are complimentary.'
I say: 'Aren't they all?'
They say: 'you want alcohol with that? Beer? Wine? Spirits?'
I say: 'What am I gonna rest my complimentary meal and my spirits on? There are no trays. This is not an aeroplane, it is a slow moving Post Office queue.'
They say: 'Oh the tray is gonna cost you. Visa, Mastercard or Diners?'
So by the time you have posted your letter, or picked up the mail orders for your illegal side-line sweatshop business from your post office box, with your post office box key, it is time to turn around and go home through the same painting of traffic as the one you had to metamorphosize through on the way in.
If you are lucky it will be a Ken Done painting of traffic and not too complicated. If you are unlucky it will be a serious tryptich oil on canvas rendering that requires a bend in the space-time continuum just to jump from tryptich PART 1 all the way across to tryptich PART 2.
So here's my solution to the slow traffic. How about we let all the really slow drivers drive only at certain times of the day. Like say, a quarter past four.
The Richard Clapton gig is coming up hard and fast, only two more sleeps. Joes Waterhole at Eumundi, Saturday night, June 24th. It's my sister's birthday, and if she can drive FOUR HOURS to get to the gig, ON HER BIRTHDAY...then so can you.
Fantastic news....my dog Barn-Boy (his stage name) has forgiven me for kicking sticks at him the other day instead of picking them up off the ground and throwing them.
