Momo, but no longer in mono.

Now. You may, like me, imagine yourself to be so used to ploughing the romantic lonely creative furrow that you’ve not only long stopped noticing the babbling noise coming out of your mouth somewhere off in the mental distance but you’ve also long since forgotten to turn around and come back and repeat this process enough times to actually finish the rest of your field and sod off to the pub. You’ve just kept on going. Ploughing that wobbly, wandering, meandering groove off into the distance, far far away from any memory of what ploughing is for or of owning a field in the first place.

That’s fine. You can sort of lose yourself in the quiet pointlessness of it. It may, after all, be no less pointless at least than sitting in the pub.

And then you notice a disturbance in the force.

A weird new noise, upsetting the dreamlike equilibrium.

It occurs to you distantly that it might be someone from the Highways department of the local council come to tell you off for just ploughing across a main road. Have you? Oh. Right.

But it’s not. It’s some other guy. Someone conspicuously Not You. But walking beside you.

As you come to your senses a little more, you stop the plough and look this weird stranger in the eye.

“Bog off! And what do you want? ..Tell me what you want before you bog off. But be very ready to bog off the nano second that you have.” you say with a cheery frown.

“Well, I’m just interested in what you’re doing, is all” the stranger weirdo replies nicely, before adding casually: “Plus you’ve known me for years, you idiot.”

“Oh. Right.” you say. “Well get off this ruddy metaphor, it’s built for one and is likely to come apart with your goofy great weight on it. It’ll either leave us in some featureless limbo or turn into a ruddy cider advert. Go on. Clear off, whatsyername.”

“I think,” says Whatsyername, “we both know this metaphor is coming apart even as we speak, leaving us in…, yes looks like a featureless limbo.”

“Oh well bloody thankyou very much” you blurt coolly, as the plough gently evaporates. “I was really enjoying that leafy summer evening country lane.”

“..With you carving a dirty great trench down the middle of it.”

“Alright, well, get to the point so we can thoughtful-punchline out of this scene and start a less rambling new paragraph.” you pout.

“The point,” says your generic friend, “is that when you realise someone else does actually get the direction you’re heading in after all these years, and joins you on the walk a little way, it doesn’t half make it all seem suddenly real and exciting.”

He/she pauses, before adding: “Of course, it’s a shame the metaphor did come apart there; there was going to be a whole party of us cheering you on to a nice big marquee at the end…”

“You idiot. What kind of end-of-scene point is that?”

—

I think, if I can remember back to the start of this journal, that I seem to have spent rather more of 2010 making music than making money or making sense. The first bit at least is remarkable.

And, on top of the various projects that Tempo seems to have on in the studio at the moment, I can only say that after a morning alternately in the company of drumming maestro Mark Addy and Sweet Strings Marshall himself, I am becoming increasingly powerless to avoid noticing a gnawing, growing sense of something adding to the whole remarkableness. I believe it might be called excitement.

About exactly what, I don’t know. Excitement is a delightful but flimsy creature, kept aloft by fanciful vagueries, so I’m not about to make a life plan for the next two years or anything. But, as Kev strummed a couple of chords of Golden Age track Just Passing Through, while I quietly sung along and plonked a couple of piano chords with him, I could suddenly imagine my ruddy navel-gazing music production work existing in the real world. Nowhere grand or silly you understand. Just somewhere like Radio One’s Live Lounge.

Well, excitement really only needs the idea of possibilities to make it and you feel quite nice, so forgive an old man his fancies. The real practical point coming home to me over the last week is that the secret to making things happen for real may turn out to be this: get some dead talented people on stage with you.

Who knew?

—

So let’s do a little list here. Hokay…

Laptop – check.

Really very good and enthusiastic drummer – ooh, check.

Really very good and enthusiastic guitarist, ready to learn my three repeating chords and join in – er, check.

Horn section. An actual ruddy horn section – poss-ib-ly… check?

Gig.

>PAUSE<

Check.

..Nerve?

Not sure.

But I’d better find some. For, yes – the list there is correct. The Troubador in Earl’s Court appears to be booked. And some incarnation of the bleating, blaring, burbling Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra is going to have to turn up and do something to fill that PA stereo output.

Fill you in soon.

Dark rise.
“I canny change the laws of physics.” It’s a clearly apocryphal quote from Scotty there.

Why? Because by the 23rd century, a starship chief engineer would know very full well that you certainly can change the laws of physics. If you’re a theoretical physicist you can make up whatever the heck you fancy.

While artworking something lastnight, I watched a programme on the telly viewer gizmo that I was clearly never going to understand much of. Horizon: Is everything we know about the universe wrong may have spent a very great deal of its screen time cutting away to boffins slo-mo drawing inexplicable Greek hieroglyphic maths on blackboards, but I came away from it with a very clear understanding. Namely, that I am a dumbo of amoebal proportions and theoretical physicists are brilliantly clever.

They are. If nothing else, they have invented a way to simply invent stuff they can’t find but really need. How Star Trek is that?

You can make up whole chunks of stuff apparently – but the trick is, I’ve learned, to make up stuff that can’t be disproved – because it can’t be proved. Genius, eh? And believe, me, dirty great swathes of the universe are, it turns out, totally made up. Like gobbledigook is made up. Like blehbleblehbleblehbleribblesnood is made up. There. Just like that.

Well I mean, really.

There in the theoretical physics canteen it’s all: “Ooh, we have a great mathematical model of the universe” one minute and then: “But we kind of need, like, WAY more gravity to make it work so we’ll, um… just, like, make up some – some invisible undetectable, ah, ‘dark’ matter that will balance the books. Sweet.”

But then it’s: “Ah. Oh. Er. So we also don’t really know why the universe is, er, not expanding and moving quite as it should be, according to our really great model of the universe. It should be slowing it’s expansion. Like a normal bang, only bigger. It’s, er, not. It shouldn’t be doing that. ..So we’ll have to… ah, make up some more stuff. Some undetectable, invisible, unknowable stuff… Stuff in the gaps. Stuff that IS the gaps – which, as those gaps grow, it grows (obviously) and so keeps feeding the expansion. Like a kind of… ‘dark energy’. (Phew. That oughta do it. Yeah. Dark energy. Nothing is nothing, baby – nothing is always something! Little physicist’s joke there, doll).”

…And THEN it’s suddenly: “Sh**. We need a whole ‘nother universe.”

What? Do we know anything anymore?

Right. So it’s ‘dark flow’ now, is it? Rummaging in our pocket universe and making our galaxies spin very unscientifically, apparently. Like the laws-of-physics-and-the-whole-theory-of-the-big-bang-model-of-the-universe says they shouldn’t be. But are.

Oh, which means there are inestimable numbers of other universes out there in the multiverse, by the way. Just so you know. So the very end of Men in black was right.

Sheeesh. Theoretical physicists. Wish I could just make up stuff for a living.

—
As I climb down from my soapmox in reverence for the fine minds and likable people I saw on this little foray into the far reaches of reality, I am reminded by a chum on Facebook that theoretical physics demands the same levels of faith in bald-faced absurdity as any religion you care to name. Which gets us nowhere practical but I guess at least proves that humans rely on their imaginations to map out the universe. We’re all people of faith and we’re all heretics, you might say.

Of course, in answer to this, I’m sure a benevolent theoretical physicist would adopt a kindly tone when pointing out that he and his colleagues are not falling prostrate before golden calf statuettes in the desert and praying for rain but in fact feeding spectacularly complex and brilliant mathematical models of otherwise ineffable things in order to arrive at sound scientific theories of how stuff works.

..To which, I suppose, a person of strong faith might kindly add: “Don’t worry, mate – you’ll catch up.”

—
I really have no idea how people do the maths to work out the universe. Or how just about anything around me works – if I hadn’t been taught to expect the iPhone from an infancy in front of science fiction, I might be persuadable that it’s fallen from heaven.

All I know is, these guys keep us all dreaming as much as they keep our feet on the ground. As one of them said with a grin: “I dreamed of going into space when I was a kid. Other worlds and far flung adventures. It lead me to do this job at a desk.”

Damn right, mate. An act of service and faith.

It may not be the job of theoretical physicists to help us find the light, but they’re certainly doing something rather more inspiring than just scratching about in the dark.