Wormhole

I fell down a wormhole this week. Not quite literally, but pretty close. Let me explain. My Larson daily tear-off cartoon strip came up with one of his greatest hits on Wednesday. It was the one with a bird and a worm in its mouth showing a cutaway beneath the ground of an upended drum kit; the inference being that's how birds hear worms (the whole vibration thing). 

The aforementioned wormhole led me astray with all sorts of forums and conversations including who came first - Larson or Dr. Worm by They Might Be Giants? Well that's not opinion, that's just counting1 - Larson 1993, TMBG 1998. Also, why would worms advertise precisely where under the ground2 they actually were (seriously!)? And then that took me down a David Bowie related path: some gadgie said if you listen to Dr. Worm and the melody in the couplet 'They call me Doctor Worm/Good morning, how are you? it's the same as Bowie's 'Because my love for you/Would break my heart in two' in Let's Dance. I didn't even have to play Bowies's 1983 smash hit single to check; you, like me, just know it to be true. It's embedded in our brains. 

They Might Be Giants - Dr. Worm (1998)

1 ©James O'Brien.

2 In actual fact, the birds tap the ground to recreate the sound of rain, the worms then rise to the surface.

"I'd like to say thank you & I hope I've passed the audition"

Taylor in his interview suit

It's London, it's 1968, and a very nervous eighteen year old musician from America is auditioning in front of one half of the Beatles. James Taylor recalls being clinically nervous playing Something in the Way She Moves to Paul McCartney and George Harrison. They must have liked him - they signed him up to Apple there and then. George in particular liked the song, using it as the template for what would become the standout track on Abbey Road. Taylor has always been sanguine when asked about the 'lift'. After all, he'd borrowed flourishes from I Feel Fine in his song. What goes around comes around.

James Taylor - Something in the Way She Moves (1968)

We've got a handful of songs to sing you

"Can I have another piece of chocolate cake?" - ©Neil Finn

You may or may not be aware that I haven't written any new songs for quite a while. I guess over the years I've written between eighty and a hundred songs in total. Of those I'd say thirty or so are keepers. And of those, I've recorded around twenty. Yet, whenever I get up and play at various folk clubs, singarounds, floor spots and the like I bet I only rotate maybe ten songs maximum. Yep, I've got stale. I've taken my foot off the gas and have been happy to coast. I generally pad my repertoire out with one or two (select) covers and would admit, quite freely, that at some point I must have turned my songwriting tap off. 

Hopefully that's about to change. I was invited to a relatively new songwriters group that's sprung up in the town and who meet on the third Thursday (I love that alliteration) of the month. So I went along last Thursday. There were seven of us. We chatted, played a brand new song each and then critiqued what we'd just heard. It was lovely. It was inspiring. This may just be the kick up the arse I need to apply seat of pants to seat of chair - as PG Wodehouse once said. My song, 'The Ocean', which was really only in embryonic form, was received really well. I'll go away now - finish it, tart it up and, while I'm about it, try and get another new song ready for next month. Footnote - it was Dan's birthday on Thursday (Dan is one of the group's founding fathers) and we had cake. Chocolate cake. Matt's wife (Matt - who started the group) baked it specially. I think I'm going to enjoy Songwriters.

Yachtless

Barrie (left) & Shawn at home

When producer & all round multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee from Young Gun Silver Fox (my go-to yacht rockers) recently hooked up with Barrie Cadogan (he of Little Barrie and, sometimes, Primal Scream), you just knew that alchemy couldn't be far away. A lot of guitars. A lot of soul. A lot of surprises too. Together they're known as Ultrasonic Grand Prix and the resulting album is called Instafuzz. This is the opening track. It's groovy. No other word for it.

Ultrasonic Grand Prix - Seamoon Rising (2024)

Dymo Dymo Dymo

In the 1970s the only hand held device I owned (not counting my portable transistor radio) was a Dymo machine. I say 'machine'; it was, in fact, nothing more than a rudimentary embosser with a crude wheel - where you fed the tape - to find the correct letter and a 'trigger' once said letter had been located. You know of what I speak - chances you had one too. Er, well those of a certain age group perhaps. Those winter nights used to fly by.

I'd have been lost without mine. All my cassettes were badged up in this way. And as I was precious about not writing on the inlay card (all my tapes were logged in a liberated exercise book from school) it was the main means of cassette identification. As you can see from this Damned C90 (their first album borrowed from Riggsby and dubbed, plus an interview they did on the radio back in the day) the unique number (28) it was given meant I could locate it in a heartbeat. In addition to all this vital* data, my exercise book also contained each track meticulously catalogued and searchable from the tape counter log ('New Rose' [525-614]) - this meant I could skip between tracks. Invaluable on Beatles albums when faced with the ubiquitous Ringo track. God, just writing this and I can see that the 15 year old me must have had way too much time on his hands.

In a house move a few years back I condensed my cassette collection down from over a hundred to just a select ten - the Crown Jewels, if you will. They and the 50 year old exercise book still reside in the bottom of a packing case somewhere in my garage. One of my Summer jobs will be (and I've been saying this since we moved into this house seven years ago) to retrieve them and reacquaint them with my Damned tape which somehow avoided being lost in the bottom of a removals chest. Watch this space for Time Team updates.

* Vital to me and precisely nobody else.