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.