the backblog

Not a lot going on on The Spring for a while, mainly due to the lack of live music going on, and the difficulty in making music with other people. But there have been a few things.

There were the 200 mixes I put together over the first 15 weeks of social distancing and lockdown in the UK. That gave me a sense of purpose and something to work on (my mixing skills have come along considerably, as well as my appreciation of various strands of house music). This led on to a series of mixes for RadioRouteStock, which has now become a weekly three-hour session (currently Friday nights, 7—10, UK time).

2020-05-10     2020-05-17     2020-05-31     2020-07-11     2020-07-17

Some of the Crash of Moons Club crew met up for an outdoor distanced meet-up to discuss ways we might start to reintroduce live music to the Canterbury area (possibly some free acoustic outdoor picnic events in public spaces?). Mainly it was just good to see each other. One of our cancelled bookings for June would have been Shadow Biosphere, a.k.a. Caroline Jago, who was going to play in the undercroft of the medieval Eastbridge Hospital on the High Street, and we've since met and talked a lot about music (she was making trance back in '96, then went on to launch Seventh Harmonic, a kind of ethno-symphonic goth project (we share a love of Dead Can Dance's '87 LP Within The Realm of a Dying Sun) who release five albums between 1999 and 2011. I invited her to contribute a guest mix to the last Canterbury Sans Frontières and she delivered a beautiful hour of electronica.

Summer solstice didn't involve a trip to Avebury this year (first time since '91!). I ended up having an incredible 30+ mile walk in the Stour Valley, visited the standing stones in St. Augustine's Abbey en route and spent the night on a neolithic longbarrow near Chilham called Julieberrie's Grave. The dawn chorus was incredible. After an exquisitely beautiful red-gold sunset seen from the edge of a wheatfield (in the company of some beautiful thistles), I cheerfully played a few Cantigas on my saz before setting off along the North Downs Way back to Canterbury.

My old friend Marcus surprised me by getting in touch to tell me had become obsessed by Peter Gabriel era Genesis, and urged me to watch this:

I was a huge fan of this era when I was 15—16, and have hardly listened since. Watching this was quite uncanny, partly because I knew all the words, all the musical twists and turns, but also because I'd never really seen what the band looked like onstage back then. Gabriel is such a weird creature, performatively. It's very captivating (especially the epic "Supper's Ready").

My friend Sam from the Cathedral Choir mentioned that since they've not been able to sing together due to lockdown (they're using pre-recorded music in the Cathedral), they'd been talking about getting together for an informal sing in the Precincts. I ended up "accidentally gatecrashing" this with friends Sarah, Megan, Andy and Dan (Sam invited me before discovering it was meant to be wholly private!) but no one minded that we were there. The "lay clerks" (correct name for the adult singers, "choristers" are the boys) stood, appropriately spaced, in a big circle under a beautiful plane tree up in a secret garden that's normally off limits (unless you're staying at The Lodge). They seemed very happy to be together again after months, so there was a lot of chatting and drinking wine, but also half an hour of singing, including (former Canterbury singer) Thomas Tallis' 16th century setting of The Lamentations (of the Prophet Jeremiah). They ended with something that reminded us of the Beach Boys! I remembered enough of the lyrics to Google and discovered it was — get this — a Randy Newman song from 1972 ("Dayton, Ohio — 1903"). We have a truly hip cathedral choir!

The last dozen or so episodes of my contemplative The Cambry Prayer lockdown mixes featured quite a lot of Bridget St. John, who I'd properly checked out (beyond her Kevin Ayers collaborations, which had been my primary interest). I remember John Peel talking about her in the 80s and 90s, as she'd recorded for his Dandelion Records label back in the 60s-70s. Beautiful stuff! Around the time I had her songs streaming through my mind, I noticed one of her intriguing song titles ("Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity") on a box of Maldon Sea Salt. I tweeted about this, tagged her in it (she's still alive and well, living in NYC, occasionally gigging with Kevin's daughter Galen, and has a Twitter account). She got back to me, which made my day : )

       

It turns out she'd got the title from a packet of salt crystals meant for water softening. So either they were a Maldon product and the slogan goes back to at least the 60s OR it was a different company and thus a weird coincidence. No word from Maldon as yet...

On the saz front, it's now been just over a year since I discovered the Cantigas de Santa Maria (triggered by a strange experience in the Avebury landscape just after summer solstice). I've been learning and practicing a couple of dozen of them (and related Marianist pieces from that era) most days since then. Luke Dodson took an immediate interest when he heard them and has been learning some acoustic guitar parts. Our first attempt to play them together felt like the beginnings of something powerful. I have plans to spawn a little Cantwaraburh Cantigas jam collective (entirely instrumental for now), all in good time...