slumming it. UK tour style for beginners - a continuing story

- Don't listen to those people with attractive uniforms urging you to buy tickets for the Gatwick Express, take the normal train it's not much slower and costs a fraction of the price. Similarly at Heathrow - forget the express and enjoy a rare breath of fresh air as the doors open to reveal the sylvan glory of Osterley station

- Always buy train tickets online, never at stations http://www.thetrainline.com/

- Always buy bus tickets on http://www.nationalexpress.com/home.aspx saving money and the endless queue at Victoria Station. You'll think you're living in an MC Escher lithograph http://www.mcescher.com/

- If you rent a car, tune in to BBC 5 Live all the time. It's  the only way to catch up on gossip and sports news whilst pretending to be listening out for their regular and predictably disaster-filled traffic news.

- This traffic news shall be your guiding star, since driving from London to Leeds could take 3 hours but on the other hand it could take 6 or 7. The difference? You'll find the answer in the harried tones of the traffic news announcer http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/

- If we're on the BBC, after the show driving home you must listen to Janice Long's show. She's been the greatest BBC Dj since the days when she had the show before John Peel on Radio 1. Right now she's on Radio 2 between midnight and 3 am and rocks the musician's regualr post-gig driving-to-the-Travelodge journey http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wr0n

- Yes. Situated on a motorway off ramp near .. err, nowhere much. A place where wireless costs £6 for 30 minutes and in their words "You are permitted to cancel your booking but not to get a refund".  Book the inevitable Travelodge on the Edge of Town more than 21 days before you need it - right now they're £12 or £19 if you do it early. http://www2.travelodge.co.uk/

- But ... right beside the Travelodge on the Edge of Town will be a service station where you can sip expensive white coffee posing as cappucino and get free wireless while munching Marks & Spencer's sarnies. If you do one thing you should always do it's

- GO TO MARKS & SPENCERS AND EAT THEIR SANDWICHES. Because you know they're worth it. For some reason nearly every motorway service station boasts one of these fine emporia (look out for the signs while you're idling in the fast lane enjoying a 60-mile traffic jam 

- Avoid the M25. Simple.

- If you must fly, go easyjet and have the heaviest hand baggage in the world and the lightest checked baggage ever checked in. See 21st Century Troubadour for detailed check in strategy.

- Never, ever, Ryanair. Repeat this mantra until you believe it. You are a musician. You have an instrumemt. Never. Ever. 

- The ferries to Ireland are good too - have fun in a floating bar filled with fun-filled fellow passengers sinking pints and eating burgers, then driving off to terrorise citizens on the other island itself. Stranraer-Belfast, Holyhead-Dun Laoghaire Fishguard-Rosslare they're interchangeable http:stenaline.co.uk/ http://irishferries.com/

Ireland ... ah ha ... like Scotland it's a whole other story. Next time.

All too brief but it's a start - let me know your tips. 

Andy

serious bread

It’s a sunny morning on Sunset and I’m not back in the Casbah. My erstwhile favourite café in Los Angeles has closed its doors to me, with news of a $10 minimum charge for using their internet connection. As a result I am a couple of blocks down the road, sipping a latte – confusingly, to be ordered only with its second syllable stressed – outdoors at Insignificance.

Insignificance is totally dedicated to an alliance between coffee and Macintosh computers. They have worked tirelessly to create an environment where they can exist in perfect symbiosis. As I order my strangely-stressed hit of caffeine, the self-styled ‘Coffee Facilitator’ with the porkpie hat starts juggling the milk and I notice behind him a line of people at the counter, eyes down, tapping away at silver Macbook Pros. Each one identical, all new models. The computers look the same too.

I’m lucky to get a seat at a table between two guys reviewing a script (on another Macbook Pro) and a threesome gathered around a book entitled ‘Hypnobirthday’. It’s about a new childbirth technique, and they’re discussing when the new mother’s going to be ‘put under’. After her waters have broken, or for an extended period of time before this – days or even weeks.

I spot a pigeon strutting around the table in front of me, looking like it owns the joint. I swear I saw it pecking away on a small laptop earlier. Hidden in the shade of the potted palm trees.

A girl is asked to move, downgraded to the corner seat because she’s punching poetry into a last year’s white Macbook. After the ‘Table Co-ordinator’ finishes dealing with her, I fear I could be next. I have a 2008 computer, and it’s squarer and clunkier than all the rest, with it’s tell-tale silver keys. I love this computer, but right now it’s the Model T Ford of this particular parking lot.

The Table Co-ordinator knows I have nabbed a good seat and is worried about the age of my laptop. He greets me with a banality. Luckily my accent, age and profession provide my usual LA passport to celebrity (for which, see previous adventures).

I may know U2. I may even be a member of U2. I may or may not be a friend of John Fluevog. I sit tight.

The table in front of me looks strangely barren, until I notice that the two musclebound beach boys looking down have iPads neatly folded in front of them, reading the papers online. London is burning in real time in small articles on American front pages. People are getting arrested and killed at a rate seems positively prehistoric for the Los Angelean. The main home news story seems to be graphs falling at vertiginous gradients. Money wins out over violence every time.

The couple next  to me who are reviewing a script, start acting it out. “That’s not sexist, it’s sexy” one screams in a sitcom voice. “Nothing wrong with sexy” replies his friend, straying into Spinal Tap territory. They discuss the finer points of the dialogue, “He could say ‘I am OK with the idea, after all - oh my - you inspired it!’ Whaddayathink?” “‘Oh my’ or ‘oh well’?” “‘Oh well’ - that’s awesome. Then Turner goes back to surgery. I like that. I can feel…” (in a falsetto voice) “…serious bread.”

I’m in the open air but under a terracotta awning. Outside in the sun, to my right, a kid is working with strings of green numbers on a black background – like on the first word processors. Perhaps this is the guy who has caused those graphs to tumble down newspaper front pages. From the level of his concentration he looks like he’s hacking into the World Bank while munching a pomegranate, peach and avocado muffin.

                                                               *

I’ve just arrived from Maggie’s Café, where I promised myself I would just have breakfast, read the LA Times, and take in the sunny morning. Not worry about tour receipts and writing and dates and schedules. I’d phone my American friends, because that’s what I do in America. We talk for very pleasant short periods of time while ducking and diving through schedules (East Coast friends) and for long periods of time with pauses and many ‘Riiiiggghhhht’s (West Coast friends and Rad, who is actually officially coastless in the sense that he’s on permanent cruise control).

The tour soundtrack is on the Maggie’s Café stereo system – the “we could have had it all” Adele song, the Katy Perry one about Friday Night where nothing much seems to happen, and the Eminem song where he sounds so tight and frustrated. OK, I realise that’s not narrowing it down a whole lot. You know the one where even he has become so bored with that same tone of voice he always uses, that he’s roped in a chick singer to lighten things up with a bit of an actual melody.

So I’m at Maggie’s and, as is usual on my LA visits, inspired to write poetry. Also as is usual I have forgotten my black book dedicated to writing poetry in. I start searching my bag for hotel notepads. That’s where most of my poems end up being written. Songs, on the other hand, often start on the back of car hire rental agreements. That’s where a whole lot of fine-print real-estate is waiting for a  Sharpie’s scribblings to turn it into a manuscript.

I send a text message here, I receive an sms there. The morning’s going well. The friend I am staying with has a reality TV series crew round for the morning and I have promised to leave them alone.

As noted, I promised myself to have breakfast, read the LA Times, and take in the sunny morning. I’ve even filled a hotel notepad and some of an Avis rental agreement with a poem and a song. I’ve done all these things but I’m looking for a little human contact.

There’s a bearded 30-something year old guy at the table to my left. When I can’t find the sugar on my table I lean over to him and ask if I can borrow his. As he reaches it over I spot mine hidden behind an enormous napkin dispenser and apologise. “Mine’s better, anyway” he laughs. I’d noticed Chris (for it is he) is half-way through what in Scotland would be called “an enorrrr-mouse booowl a porridg’“ and he’s eating it with strips of fried orange bacon. The bacon has been artificially coloured and crushed by a James Bond villain to become a new substance, unrecognisable as meat.

Chris and I strike up a friendship, bonding over a combination of oatmeal and memoir. He tells me that’s what he’s writing. I say I think he looks a little young to be looking back over his life and he explains that ‘memoir’ doesn’t necessarily mean that anymore. Apparently it’s being used by young people to take ownership of whatever story it is that they are telling. Almost to simply express that it’s not a novel – a memoir has authenticity as the writer’s own story.

It’s the “is this the real thing” question I often come up against in Los Angeles. Like when I was sitting in my friend’s garden under the shade of  a tree which was growing oranges, lemons and limes from the same branches. And the fruit was undoubtedly real.

I’m thinking perhaps I was wrong to write “This is not a memoir” in the press release for ‘21st Century Troubadour’. For me, the word reeks of retired politicians - that and rock books half-written by drummers or rhythm guitarists telling everyone how the crowd went wild at their every show, the audience gave back amazing energy and - if I remember correctly - the drummer pounded out the beat for hours as if his life depended on it.

I ask Chris what his book is about. He won’t tell me - a good answer. Write the memoir, don’t spend the time telling everyone about it so many times that (a) you get bored of the stories and (b) there’s no time for the actual writing.

We talk back and forwards about books and films. Malibu (where he has come from), Ireland (where he has visited), cars (he has an old Porsche) and Justin Bieber. I should  qualify that last one.

Justin Bieber. You see, I’ve just arrived from Canada, and Air Canada has a highly effective Justin Bieber policy. Even if the flight looks like it’s on time as you’re boarding, as soon as the doors are closed they lock the plane down, keeping it on the runway for up to two hours with the air-conditioning off, so as they can force you to watch the Justin Bieber movie. There’s simply no escape from the precocious Ontarian wunderkind.

In another country this kind of behaviour would be regarded as direct contravention of the Geneva Convention of Human Rights. To lock people up without food or drink in an airless Bieber-filled environment would surely be actionable in the Hague Court of International Justice. Bringing charges of ‘Severe Aural Abuse’ could be another angle in a court of law.

In addition to mental torture, the physical pain I endure in the endless wait for the Justin Bieber movie to end - cramped conditions, no natural light, endless choruses of repeated banalities - is only exaggerated by the exhausting routine of the Biebs himself. He’s constantly dancing, exercising, playing basketball, warming-up, singing, signing (autographs) and always always talking and goofing for the camera.

About five hours into the movie there’s a let-up when JB loses his voice. Since it provides the only real drama of the whole marathon experience, I suspect it’s a set-up. Especially when, two days after wrecking his voice in a Mylie Cyrus sex-free love-duet, he is ordered to stop talking by his voice coach and pumped full of vitamins by a man in a white coat. These two offsiders say things like “You simply can’t talk for 24 hours. Period.” in a stern voice and, “Those two strips of flesh are what your entire career depends on right now. Your vocal chords are a sacred place.”

The drama is worthy of ‘Masterchef’. It’s that intense. Wondering whether JB’s voice will recover in time for the Madison Square Garden concert or not is the equivalent of the ‘Waiting For The Judges’ Verdict’ bit in ‘Whatever Your Country Happens To Be’s Got Talent’ or ‘Wherever You Live Idol’. It’s as nerve-wracking as wondering whether the soufflé will rise or not, or if Nigella’s hubby will go down and nick all the goodies in the fridge before the Kitchen Love Goddess sticks her finger into a Chocolate Surprise and breathes “Yummy!” into the camera.

Twelve hours later - the movie is shot in realtime, obeying the Aristotelian principles of time and place, ie it’s all set either in a characterless venue or a tour bus and takes as much time to happen as the events it portrays - the Bieb-boy takes the stage to wild applause and serious pre-teen screaming. He sings flawlessly, as if aided by forces beyond all human ken.

In Maggie’s, someone at the next table past Chris is reading last month’s MOJO magazine with Paul McCartney on the front cover. I ask if I can look through it. It’s weird to read lists of Ghosts of English Tour Dates Past. Although, not as weird as the ‘50 Reasons To Like Macca’ pull-out section. Why? Well - it’s a bit obvious, innit?

Because he’s fab. Always will be.

Chris tells me how to get into the closed section of the Malibu Colony. I tell him I’ve been to Ojai (a hippy town the same distance out of LA as Malibu, filled with aromatherapists and a place called the ‘Psychic Boutique’). I tell Chris I have written a book but since I know I have made a new friend I refuse to tell him what it’s about. Instead we talk about the number of words on a page. I think ‘21st Century Troubadour’ has 90,000 on 300 pages.

That’s a whole lotta words, as someone without much imagination might say. I can’t help it. It’s a whole lotta words.

I’d like to put the book out so that you could read it on one of those ‘e-reader’ devices (you could read it though I couldn’t – my eyesight isn’t good enough any more). You see there’s no way I can carry around enough copies of the book on tour. Every time I leave I fill up The Bag with them. They disappear just as quickly, the first few days I’m on the road. Always.

I remember that a slim volume awaits me, on my return to Australia. I haven’t told anyone about it yet, but I’ll have it on Thursday. Perhaps it’ll find its way into The Bag and stay there for a little longer.

                                                               *

Back in Insignificance, a man walks in with a four-day-old puppy, the cutest thng you’ve every seen. He’s grey-haired and stubbly. Looking OK in a T-shirt and Converses, like an older G. Clooney he is giving guys like me hope, but the real centre of attention if the four day old puppy. Did I say it was the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? Cuter than Prince in the video for the song that’s just playing. Cuter even than the baby labrador chewing on a Macbook power adaptor under the poet girl’s table. Cuter still than the girl with the hat at the coffee counter. Not cuter than the French girl with the stripey top who walks past now and then clearing tables outside the next-door restaurant. The one where Daniel Lanois and Patti Smith played an acoustic fundraiser last month. If you bought a ticket you had dinner with them. Heavy-framed glasses were a prerequisite at that table, I don’t know how I can tell. I just can.

This morning, Raybans are back in in LA. Goodbye Aviators, Arrivederci Mirrored Wraparounds, Farewell to the Face-Eater. Open those drawers and see if you can fund that old chunky pair of ‘Highway 61’ style face furniture.

The table on my left breaks out singing in a chorus of “Hypnobirthday to you” and the four-day-old puppy walks past with the grey-haired man. The hypofans dissolve into jelly screaming as if possessed “he’s sooooo cuuuute”.

A guy has just sat down beside me with an equally old Mac laptop. It’s clunky and the keys are covered in grey grime. I am willing to bet that the screen carries the imprint of the keyboard. He’s on Craig’s List looking for a place to live, like everyone else in this café. Chris told me earlier that a one-bedroom place costs $1600 per month. That’s better value that $1600 per moth, which is what I originally typed. Those lepidopterae sure earn the big bucks for all that window-banging.

This afternoon I’m going to break into Malibu colony, mentioning my new friend’s name. Then I’ll finish the song I started on the Avis rental agreement and search pet shops for as cute a puppy as the four-day-old puppy whoe grey-haired owner has just left Insignficance.

He’s smiling (the cute puppy) and panting (the grey-haired owner, who’s just experienced more chick affection by puppy proxy than I’ve ever seen anywhere).

Serious bread indeed.

new york city of models

Yesterday New York was like a movie set. Alright, it's always like a some kind of movie set, but this one was a romantic comedy with the sun shining on the brownstones and people walking around in T shirts laughing. Like they're all living in the "shopping and trying on hats" section of the film, and it lasts forever. The headcases roaming the streets dressed as Superman and fast food items (1 x Burger, 3 x Hot Dogs) were characterful heroes of the sidewalks,  not to-be-avoided-at-all-costs crazies.

I met Rachael in a 9th floor rehearsal room, and I was instantly ushered into the leather-clad world of New York rock, with posters of Blondie, Lou Reed and Aerosmith (?) on the walls of the hallway. The reception room was peopled by guys with stubble and rock t shirts wearing shades indoors, and musicians lounging on sofas looking like they're going for a 'Velvet Underground Reformed - This Time They're All Attractive' audition. Wish I hadn't shaved today.

Later, skipping over kerbs dragging the only slightly lighter second cousin of The Bag, my guitar and a hundred plastic Troubadour bag, Rachael and I were transported into Model World. The sidewalks were glistening in very recent rain, as if art directed. Statuesque girls gathered in groups. waiting for the lights to change, with expectant open-mouthed looks, but never crossing the road. They leaned against lamp posts and stood against walls with one foot raised in the traditional 'Rock Model' pose. Were we dragging luggage through a Vogue photo shoot, unawares?

Gaggles and cliques and broods and displays of girls over 6 feet tall with tight jeans and leather knee-length boots. They glanced over their shoulders as we passed, their eyes fixed on a far off point, somewhere in another galaxy. Occasionally one of them would laugh, exposing her perfect teeth to the streetlamps' glow, and then the rest would join in, like a giant commercial for a mobile phone company.

All around us, House Concert Wars raged. Tiny sparks flying up above the skyscrapers from states as Iowa and Florida. That very afternoon I had been phoned by one of the adversaries, calling from a small town in the Mid West. Reports were serious - thousands affected, CNN crews approaching. Never underestimate the collateral damage caused by the wrath of a slighted House Concert presenter. My phone still humming from the ferocity of one side of the conflict, it rang again. I pressed 'Ignore'. Rachael told me about a concert she's been booked to play in Amsterdam. Thoughtlessly, I told her about a group who organize concerts in a library in Rotterdam. I should have known better - this group split from the Amsterdam House Concert people in a schism the likes of which still resonate throughout the Lowlands.

It's a long way from the less than zero cold of Canada, to 27 degrees at 10pm on 7th Avenue, hot and close like before a thunderstorm. Turning a corner the first drops of rain started and I saw a guy hailing a cab. As multiple cabs passed him by, I realized he wasn't really hailing a cab but posing like an advertisement of someone hailing a cab. Ridiculously good-looking, hair tousled and now gently flecked with rain, we had left the girls behind only to run the gamut of a group of muscle-crunching stubble-dusted male models gathered here to celebrate their own beauty. Not far from their female equivalents distance-wise, but in their own separate world of exquisitely beautiful suffering. No smiles this time, only chiselled jawlines pointing towards the glowering heavens. 

*

A change of weather this morning, and it does seem extreme. RIght now it's raining, and the non-stop stream of corduroy-wearing artistic types and style icons is unstoppable outside the cafe window where I'm writing. Half an hour ago I walked in and asked a man studying diagrams in a text book, and sketching them on note pad, if I could sit down. He moved his papers and I handed him his phone. I decided not to write, not to read - just to watch. But it's difficult not to write it down when it's happening all around you,

A tall guy in a checked shirt with geek glasses and fairly long hair walks in and I notice him waiting for ages to get a seat. There's a line-up for soy cappucinos and chai lattes stretches from 4th Street to Central Park. This guy's trying to eat a sandwich and hold his coffee while standing up. Just as he masters this, someone hands him a soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. He asks if he can sit down and asks me if there's room beside me and the scribbler. He asks what my pin says (that's a badge, UK people). I tell him it says 'Stand Up To Rock Stars' and was the only piece of U2 merchandise The Teenager and I could afford to buy at their Melbourne show. We loved the show but the $50 T shirts just didn't cut it.

It seems my new friend played in a band last night at a Banana Republic fashion show for their new collection. It was, by all accounts, Model World 2. Full of the same 6 foot plus girls I'd moved amongst the previous evening. As he described the fashion show, I notice a girl at the table behind him studying a script. Tall, Eastern European looking, all cheekbones and dramatic expressions. Until now she's been doing yoga stretches while reading. Now she quickly looks around and takes out a Subway sandwich, breaks it in half, and eats it ravenously, hiding it under her script.

My new friend turns out to be from LA. He's wearing a checked shirt from the home of vintage clothes. In fact, from the city where vintage clothes never have to call themselves vintage. He knows Tom Petty's daughter - she plays Highway 61 at high volume in her house opposite a friend of mine. He has been to the Casbah Cafe and busked on Grafton Street in Dublin. It's a small musical world in this café We strike up a conversation with the guy drawing diagrams, who's trying to work out the relationship between (a) the planets in the solar system, (b) the chakra points in the human body, and (c) the notes in a musical scale. We talk digeridoos and baritone guitars. My theory is that low instruments draw people towards them. There's something mysterious and exciting, satisfying, about their sound.

As we're talking, another towering model walks in and I watch her sit down beside the yoga-stretcher and eat the other half of the Subway sandwich, kneeling down under the table so as no one will see her. 

Another day, another movie set. The sound system in this café just played 'Uncle Albert' by Paul McCartney and 'Tangled Up In Blue'. Like the Beaqtles in Liverpool and U2 in Dublin, it's impossible not to think of Bob Dylan while walking on 4th St, Bleecker Street and the village. red bricked houses with stoops like the Stones video for 'Faraway Eyes'. The sound system plays 'Mandolin Wind' by Rod Stewart and as the first bars of 'Freebird' start, I feel it's time to be movin' on. There's a show tonight on Allen Street and I'm off to collect my guitars. Friends old and new are phoning. Another model buys a take away coffee and is bent over in the café doorway, trying to light a cigarette underneath her perfectly-formed lapels. The wind howls up 1st Avenue, and I am stuck in one of those moments when I think this Troubadour Life is where it's at.

All I have to do is to get out of this café before the guitar solo starts.

as summer turns into spring

It's a hot evening in Melbourne. The temperature has hovered around 40 degrees, as summer kicks in after the wettest December - January here for ages. There's a cyclone warning on the TV for Queensland, and in Victoria reservoirs are up to 53% of capacity from around 30%. This year floods are the story - two years after the bushfires. Can somebody tell me why there's any doubt about climate change? The jury is most definitely in. It's so 'in' that it shouldn't even remember why it was ever 'out'.

Since getting back from the autumn European tour (I just read the previous 'landing' story and realise it's a long time since I've written here) I've been in the studio, reading, producing songs or thinking about producing songs. Watching or playing tennis, with The Teenager, jamming with his group occasionally and preparing for the 'Fearing & White' project - of which more later.
The Australian Open is over. It's hard to believe I live in - or just outside - a city which holds a grand slam tournament every year. It's not something which people talk about when extolling the virtues of Melbourne - they're always banging on about galleries, cafés and theatre. Christ - you can get a latte anywhere now. Give me the blue courts any time.

When I lived in London, years ago, Wimbledon was just a hazy childhood dream  - it never seemed real enough to actually go there (or to be able to afford to go there). So, even though I did make it to Centre Court one blowy June evening to watch mixed doubles, Wimbledon exists in my imagination as a blur of colour TV, with a particular shade of yellow lettering against the green, with the soundtrack of Dan Maskell's gentle commentary. The pick-pock of balls, interrupted only by gentle applause and Dan's breathy approval of a shot or rally - "Extraordinary".  As a headbanded Bjorn Borg beat McEnroe again. And again.

I have loved tennis since I was ten or eleven, when I realised that sport doesn't have to involve being buried in mud and then sat upon by 14 huge guys intent on your unnaturally early demise. Or in which a hard leather ball is aimed at your head on a regular basis either by a variety of specialist assassins, or an entire team wielding wooden sticks designed for the purpose of splitting open your teenage skull.

That was when my love affair with tennnis began. I was never that good - except in my head, where I won rallies and tournaments - but all these years later my personal tennis-based journey continues with an ongoing series of matches vs. The Teenager, who has taken up the racquet and playing better with it than I ever did. Since I have about a year left where I have a chance of beating him, I have to pack as many matches into this period as possible. Today I narrowly avoided  the  drubbing I received last week, escaping to win in the third 6-1, 6-7, 6-2 (though this may have had something to do with the fact that he was late for band practice, as I found out to my deep chagrin after shaking hands).

So. I apologise for the silence, but I have not been idle by any means. The autumn tour was simply too full on to write anything more than a note in passing on facebook or twitter as the miles and kilometers fell off the road signs. I remember mornings spent at coffee shops on the M1 and M6, angling the computer to get wi fi with my taste-free coffee, and wondering if I could ever have written '21st Century Troubadour' in 2010. Having my sister Cathy on the road with me was fantastic, but the family love-in time we had together (and with other sister Ali at the Northern Irish concerts)  meant a social footprint from the tour, not necessarily one measured by a word count.

So - some tour news. At the end of the summer break in Australia I end up playing the Port Fairy Folk Festival, down the Ocean Road about 5 or 6 hours from Melbourne. Port Fairy used to be called Belfast, but changed the name by deed poll a while ago. It's a great town and the music extends well beyond the Folk Festival Fence.

After that it I head for North America again, to play 'Songwriter' launch shows in Seattle, New York and the Mid West. Seattle I haven't played for ages and I am looking forward to getting back there. It's a haven of good friends, one of whom - Drew Dundon - is opening for me at Egan's Ballard Jam House on the grooviest street in town.

The New York show is at Rockwood II in the East Village, next door to the Rockwood Music Hall where I've played the last couple of times in Manhattan. Wildflower Records are finally releasing the album and I am sharing the bill with the highly talented Rachael Sage, a New York singer-songwriter whom I met in York last autumn.

Talking of the UK again - Cathy and I are planning a June concert in London where we'll be performing a similar mix of readings from 21st Century Troubadour and songs from 'Rave On' to 'Songwriter'.

After this I'm headed for the Mid West. Meeting up with Rad and driving the long open roads of Iowa and Minnesota. I can't wait. The kind of trip where it's so flat you have to open the door to check out if the car's still moving.

We start in Chicago playing the latest in my one-show-a-year residency at the Celtic Knot in Evanston. After that there's a concert in a museum in Mount Vernon, near Rad's hometown of Iowa City, followed by a return visit to the ever-wonderful Oak Center General Store. Those of you who have our live album will know the vibe, and it features in '21st Century Troubadour'. In fact, Sandy Dyas took the photos for the book inside and outside the General Store.

The last show in this run is at the beautifully-named Aunt Annie's Quilts in Avon, Minnesota. I haven't been there before, but Rad loves it and Lucy who runs it sounds great. I did have a wonderful Aunt Annie, though, who lived in Dublin .... but that's another story ...

The next morning I leave for Canada, where I will open six shows for Judy Collins in and around Toronto.

Judy owns the aforementioned Wildflower Records. I just saw her Melbourne show and it rocked. Folked. Well - you know what I mean. Her voice is amazing and her stories of helping discover Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and of being in and around the folk revival and civil rights protest movement in '60s New York City, are amazing.

See you on the road this year. Even if you suspect it doesn't make sense, remember the words of Liam Neeson: "It's my job. It's what I do."

Love, as ever,

Andy

2.2.11

coming in to land

I'm on the plane and I just had to open up my Mac laptop, after watching so many opening and closings in 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', somewhere 30,000 feet above India on the approach to Singapore. In every scene of the film there's  a silver computer showing us a glowing white apple. Furious actress fingers skitter over its keyboard and on the screen windows open and close as each innovative feature of the magic box is lovingly demonstrated.

The plot of the film may not be as good as the book - sorry, I haven't read it yet - but the screenplay seemed to have been written by the same guys who write the 'how to' instruction videos on the Apple website. You know the ones where windows flash open and zoom shut, revealing secrets, information, photos and emails with incredible technological ease as a guy in casual clothes and a calm voice tells you the only thing you should covet is his lifestyle in general and, in particular, one of his computers.

In the movie, these backlit objects of desire are mercilessly snapped shut after they reveal their secrets. Banged together like clapperboards, only to be yanked open again by another clumsy pair of actor hands, stabbing and jabbing at the 'on' button with a rough index finger.

Since writing '21st Century Troubadour' I seem to have experienced a row number upgrade. Perhaps the airlines' computers have talked with each other, flapping open and shut in an electricity break. Maybe data-searching actress fingers have alerted them to the fact that I should really be moved up the plane from Seat 68F - the position I thought I was brought into this world to occupy - to somewhere a little closer to the wings.

So here I am stretching out in Seat 40K, the new 68F. And I've just had a Hogwarts moment, up at the back of the plane. You'll know what I mean if you've gone looking for Platform 9 and a half at Kings Cross Station in London. Well, the scene which just greeted me at the back of this aeroplane is no less impressive than the extra platform.

I made my way to the furthermost regions of the centre aisle and came upon a staircase bathed in light exactly where the toilets usually are. You know - the place where a crowd of stretching people gathers (unless its an American airline, in which case this kind of congregation is classed as a subversive meeting and all involved can be arrested by an air marshall and dragged off for immediate waterboarding by a man with a moustache, a stumpy cigar, and a set of electrodes).

Today these glowing steps look like a stairway to airline heaven. A brave new world that has about 150 seats in it. Even though there's no smoking upstairs, this is a double decker plane, and it reminds me of the old buses they used to have in Belfast. Many's the afternoon our Granny would take us on 'Joe's Bus' for a trip to Belfast Castle, Stormont, or the airport. Yes, Aldergrove international airport, nestling between Lough Neagh and the Lisburn bypass, to watch the planes taking off and landing. I remember riding the carousel with the bags. Well, it kept us off the streets.

So, as dawn breaks on this Singapore morning I am thinking about the top deck of a Belfast bus while the Girl With A Dragon Tattoo sighs and pulls on a blonde wig while a caring Swedish actor looks on, craggy as a handsome crag in snowstorm. We're coming in to land at Singapore and there are cliffs and crashing waves below. The pilot tells us it's 27 degrees and to switch off our laptops.

I am about to slam mine shut. I'll see you next time, if it survives.

Samuel Beckett - Front and Centre

I'm kicking leaves walking down Nicholson Street, and these new shoes are hurting. I’ve been told once already today that this level of suffering is run of the mill for any girl who wears high heels, but that's not helping. Much. My ‘Typically Male Pain Threshold’ has been thoroughly mocked so I’m trying to tough it out. And all because my beautiful new pair of black birthday boots is e,actly the right size. For my smaller foot.

I will admit that comfort wasn't the decisive factor in my choosing the wrong size of boots. If you’ve been shoe size 43 most of your life, and then notice over the years that the size which fits you increases to 44 and then to 45 – and if you then go into a shoe shop and the assistant offers you a size 43 which seems to be an e,act fit, you're predisposed to take it. The years slip away as you slip yourself in, Cinderella-like. You know you’ll buy into any decreasing numbers game - even it’s a losing one.

So I'm kicking leaves and limping in the Melbourne winter sunshine, wondering if my slight shuffling will win me any sympathy votes, when I notice the Melbourne Museum is advertising an e,hibition of memorabilia from the Titanic. I get a frisson of hometown pride as I crane my neck to look up at the enormous black and white e,hibition poster blocking out most of the clear blue sky above me. It shows a group of shipyard workers at Harland and Wolff standing beside the Titanic's propellor blades in the dry dock, dwarfed by the scale of the ship's steering mechanism.

It crosses my mind that the Titanic museum in Belfast may be lying empty, cleaned out by this travelling circus. And that most of the things from the Titanic should be at the bottom of the ocean, where they belong. The last e,hibition I noticed at this museum was called something like ‘Treasures of Pompeii’, so they're obviously stuck on a mass-grave theme. Shining sarcophagi? Bring ‘em on.

As I look up, I inadvertently kick over a half-empty cleanskin bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon standing on the pavement ne,t to a parking meter. 2004 - not such a good year. You've got to hand it to the Australian wino, he's got taste. And in the middle of a nationwide wine glut, he can afford to be fussy.

*

I cross the road and make my way past Parliament station onto Lonsdale Street. The Comedy Theatre is where a three week run of ‘Waiting For Godot’ is coming to a close, and I have a ticket for today's matinee performance. Estragon and Vladimir have been advertising the show for months on television and in the papers - Ian McKellen and Roger Rees have taken the two tramps and made them Everymen everywhere. There’s a guy with ragged hair and a grey beard sucking on a cigarette standing by the stage door. Looks like … it can’t be … was it?

Even if it wasn’t, my instant reaction to a guy in battered clothes smoking near the stage door is not to ignore him but to wonder which part he is playing. Sam Beckett's characters have entered into the life of the city, filling up the back pages of colour supplements and giveaway newspapers with full page advertisements and news stories. They are not only to be found in the arts pages. In the queue to pick up tickets, the girl behind me tells her partner that one of the actors has been speaking at a Same Se, Marriage rally in town. Her partner replies, saying that that during rehearsals McKellen took a breather - in costume - on a bench near the theatre. Someone running past dropped a dollar into his upturned bowler and the actor has stuck the coin above his dressing room mirror for luck.

The queue is buzzing. People are talking about this 1956 Theatre of the Absurd drama, the last shot of Joyce's e,-proof reader for success after a series of eccentric novels. People who won't have seen anything else by Beckett are going to see this play. People are going to this play who will only go the theatre once this year. And one of them, I am ashamed to say, is me.

I held off buying a ticket for weeks. They're so e,pensive I kept telling myself I'd read my battered student copy of the play sitting on a park bench near the cricket oval down the road and save myself $100. I've seen the play before, I've read it several times, borrowed a couple of lines from Pozzo's last speech (in 'Na Na Na Na') and paid an hommage of sorts in the song named after its author on 'Garageband'. But yesterday I gave in – I couldn’t miss this production.

I called the theatre bo, office and the lady who answered told me that she was about to make my day. "Go right ahead. Please," I said, trying to get some Clint Eastwood grit in my voice. I waited. She waited. The pause went way past Beckett – it was positively Pinteresque. Eventually she told me the producers had just released some tickets and that I'd see what she meant by “making my day” as soon as I walked into the theatre.

This afternoon I emerge from fhe upstairs bar and as soon as I enter the theatre I understand. The usher looks at my ticket and escorts me to my seat. I am sitting front and centre in the dress circle to watch Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece. It's like being onstage for Neil Young at the London Fleadh in 2000. Hold on, it's better than that. It’s like opening the envelope with my name on it outside David Bowie's Rod Laver Arena show in 2004 and realising I'd be in the front row, barely twenty feet from my childhood hero. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.

I remember once being upgraded to business class on the notorious United Airlines si,teen-hour ‘Back to the 70s’ Melbourne to LA flight. Alright, I admit it, nothing involving seating is better than that.

*

The theatre isn't grotty, but it's getting there. It has seen better days, but this suits the play. The seats are tough, red, old-style cinema seats and the plaster walls need a little work. Some of the lights in the candelabra aren’t working. Since the stage set is what looks like a bombed-out theatre, all grey plaster-covered bricks and empty spaces, it blends into this real live theatre seamlessly. You can see right through to the back of the stage where there are more broken bricks, wrecked walls and plaster dust. The tree has grown up through the boards of the stage, so the destruction must have happened a long time ago. It's like a bombed theatre in 1945 Berlin, or London after the Blitz, left to rot.

I am e,tremely glad I’m here and not reading my battered student edition of the play on a bench by the oval (even if that's where Sam might have preferred to be on this sunny May afternoon) because there is so much in the performance of Beckett, so much squeezed between the lines which you miss on the page. The music hall atmosphere between the two main actors allows the comedy to shine. Lucky's speech is still near-incomprehensible, but it doesn't matter – I can understand the sense of what he's saying through the rhythm and repetition of the lines. When reading the play, your eye is tempted to skim over this tour de force - in the theatre it's captivating.

Act One opens when Estragon hauls himself over a back wall and sits down to take off his shoes. They're hurting. I can feel my boots and start the long process of slipping them off without anyone in the dress circle knowing.

I'm seeing McKellen for the first time since the RSC Lear a couple of years ago, and this movement from King to tramp is ringing bells in my head. Estragon is not mad, but he is old and it makes me wonder whether it's easier to have only a little to lose, rather than a lot. Or whether it's just difficult in a different way. Since it's Beckett, the latter is probably true - it's all difficult.

On stage, the difference between the two main characters is startling. Reading the dry, stripped-down lines on paper, it's easy to lose track of a clear distinction between the two of them - but not in the theatre. Estragon is a tetchy, forgetful clown, played a bit ‘Grim Up North’ glum, like an ancient Eric Morecambe. Vladimir is more of an optimist, a dreamer. But he can still remember details – he’s an educated man fallen on hard times. He reminds me of Little Dorrit's uncle or – yes - Ernie Wise.

Although the tramps talk of ‘going’, they're going nowhere. All the time they say nothing is happening, they are busy. Busy passing the time while waiting for Godot. His arrival could mean anything - Godot stands for whatever they want to happen. I used to think it was a religious thing, but today I don't. As far I can see, religion is disposed of early on in this play.

By the end of the first half I'm laughing and my feet are hurting from the too-small shoes – I haven’t been able to slip them off, though I tell myself it’s making me empathise with some of the onstage pain. As happens a lot with Beckett, what isn't there (a plot) is making my mind wander towards the big questions. What's it al about. Where does it all end.

Looking at these two Everymen I come to the conclusion - for now - that none of us knows anything. Or, alternatively, all of us know nothing. Life is just passing the time, waiting. While waiting, what's important is company. Friendship is is what wil help us get through.

*

By the end of the first half, Lucky and Pozzo have come and gone, and Estragon leaves his boots centre stage. During the interval I mainline caffeine and chocolate in a coffee shop around the corner. On the way back I see the same grey-bearded man in the battered suit smoking at the stage door. Now I know he’s not one of the actors, but he looks like a Dublin bookie, hassled and dragging hard on his cigarette. I mark him down as the reincarnation of Beckett, standing eagle-faced at the stage door in a false beard, keeping an eye on the director, seeing that he’s keeping to the stage directions precisely.

*

At the start of the second half, leaves have appeared on the tree, but nothing else has changed. And perhaps the first half didn't even happen, since no one on stage seems to be able to remember it.

I finally cast off my shoes, under cover of darkness. I hope I don't lose them under the seats. Onstage the boots move around, passed from character to character, but eventually return to centre stage. I'm getting to the heart of the play.

The boots, the pain they bring, and... the hats. It's as if Morecambe and Wise didn’t get a TV show but ended up in a bombed out music hall. I wonder what Bob Dylan and Tom Waits would be like playing the tramps, sitting on Desolation Row. Although it’d be great, I think it’d be a waste of their time – they could write their own absurdist drama and it would be amazing.

Just when my mind is wandering , and I’m wondering if Vladimir and Estragon really are Everymen, or is it just about the two of them, the stage lights focus into one large spotlight beam. Night falls, they stare up at the sky and then face each other.

One says, “Well? Shall we go?” and the other, “Yes, let's go.”
As the light fades, I can see and hear the stage direction from memory. It’s as if someone has read it aloud in my ear:

They do not move.

*

The end of a play is a strange thing. People on stage turn out not to be the people you thought they were. Your neighbours sitting beside you (the ones trying to avoid eye contact all afternon) smile and want to share how good the play was with you. There are no closing credits, just curtain calls without a curtain and a soft-shoe shuffle across the stage by Ian and Roger.

Outside it’s five o’clock, and the afternoon performance of ‘Mamma Mia’ at the theatre across the road has also just finished. The two sets of theatre goers mingle, collide, and make their way towards the station. On the way there’s a line-up of people near the stage door which I assume to be for autographs – it turns out to be a queue to pay for the multi-storey car park.

We gather on platform four, clutching our programmes. Weirdly, the Abba fans look more dysfunctional than the Beckett ones - but also a lot happier. The Beckett fans bury their heads in the glossy pages of their programmes, trying to glean every cent of value from the $20 they have forked out for them.

At the ne,t stop, Richmond, the train is mobbed by football fans. Talking statistics and wearing scarves. Red and black, black and white. That’s when I know that we’re all still in the play together,

“Do we get off here?”
“Yes.”

The train goes through the station without stopping. Nobody moves. Nobody gets off.

“Do we get off here?”
“No, we have missed our stop.”
“Which stop?”
“The right stop. The one we just missed.”
“Why did we miss it?”
“This is a limited e,press.”
“But it’s not going that fast.”
“That’s why it’s limited.”
“So we have to get off at the wrong stop?”
“Yes. That’s right. The wrong one.”

Nobody moves.

These shoes really are starting to hurt, and here come the ticket inspectors.

Casbah Café Confidential

Greetings once more from Los Angeles. Shark just walked out the door and I am left alone with the typing pool in the Casbah Café. All there’s left for me to do, after contemplating this most beautiful of afternoons, is to unzip my laptop and up the 5 :1 Mac to PC ratio to 5.5 : 1.

That’s right. There are eleven white apples, lit up between these walls, and Sunset Boulevard sunlight coming in through high windows. The PC couple sit defiantly at a back table, frowning. Gaming. The café is painted in Mexican colours and has second-hand clothes and pretty trinkets for sale as well as coffees, sandwiches, and an enormous pile of bananas for $1 apiece.

On my right is a guy with a beard who looks to me like a Metallica roadie until he takes a portfolio out of his steel roadie case and starts showing the man next to him his photos. I can see the pictures as he flicks through the pages - fashion shots, CD covers, portraits of actors and politicians. Black and white, colour, big arty magazine covers. His friend nods and he quickly put the shots away and goes back to sipping his coke. Real slow. Roadie slow.

On his right, also on the bench against the wall, looking into the bright room, is a grey-haired woman wearing black. I have already met her outside the café - in fact I know her name.

I was waiting outside the café in the bright lunchtime sunshine for Shark to arrive when she spotted my Beatles T shirt. She came up and started talking to me. Well, I say that she talked, but to be truthful she really only said one word. I am wearing a T shirt which has a magnified black and white photo of the Beatles from around the time of ‘Rubber Soul’ on the front. The grey-haired lady dressed in black just took one look and let out a long sigh. “Paul…”

Anne Elizabeth (I can’t decide if she has a surname or simply two first names) told me she’d been at the last concert the Beatles ever played. That’s right, she brought up the subject right there on that corner of Sunset Boulevard. With the lunchtime sun blazing down and the line to get into the Casbah spilling people out onto the sidewalk.

“It was at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, August 29, 1966. They played for fifteen minutes. It was wonderful.” I asked her how she could remember the exact date, “How could I ever forget it?” “Did you scream?” “Of course I screamed!” “Did you scream because you thought you should scream, or because you really wanted to scream?” Anne Elizabeth looked serious for a moment - thoughtful, reverend. Then back to joyous, “Those four guys just had it all. They made you want to scream. Frank Sinatra had it… Elvis I guess… so we had seen the screaming before, but those four guys just had it all.”

“Really, was the show only fifteen minutes long?” “It might have been twenty. It was short, but they could have done whatever they liked and I guess they got frustrated with us screaming.” “Did you hear anything?” “No, we were screaming too loud.” “Was there anyone else playing that day?” “Otis Redding sang ‘The Dock Of The Bay’ and the Ronettes were on too.”

Here I am talking Candlestick Park. And they said no one would understand the title of my song.

A car screech up to the kerbside, with another one close behind. Two guys get out, looking lost. That’s because they are lost, and looking for Santa Monica. The ocean. Anne Elizabeth goes into the café to get a pencil and paper so as she can tell them exactly how to get there. All the passengers pile out of the two cars and start smoking. They are parked crazily and one of them tells me that they’ve just arrived from Poland.

Anne Elizabeth comes out with pen and paper and starts drawing a map on the roof of their rental car.

By now the Casbah queue has diminished somewhat. There’s a chance for me to go in and hold a table. I order a coffee and sit down, excited amongst the cyber-surfers after my encounter with history. I’m thinking that the Casbah in Liverpool was where the Beatles started. Maybe it’s even where they first played as a group, since it was owned by Pete Best’s mum.

And I’m thinking that the chances of being greeted outside the LA Casbah this morning by a grey-haired woman wearing black called Anne Elizabeth who had gone to the last ever Beatles concert at Candlestick Park which is the name of a song on my latest album which I am launching in LA tonight are slim indeed on any kind of scale you’d care to mention. Apart, that is, from that of a 21st Century Troubadour.

I love this life, and you know I do. Because things just happen this way. You put yourself out there on the corner of the lights at Sunset and Maltman and things will happen. We both know that by now.

The tour has its own logic, its own narrative. Its own crazy characters spinning inside this world but starring in their own personal movies, who nonetheless want to reach out and touch and share or say hello, on this fine Los Angeles afternoon, to the lost-looking tour-knackered Irish guy wearing a black and white print of the Beatles in 1965.

*

Back amongst the Apples, a Goth girl at the table beside me is on the phone. She’s simultaneously reading through a script called ‘Cassowary Part II’ and talking to a girlfriend. She’s got one of those up and down could-be-Australian-or-Californian accents in which the pitch of her voice glides up at the end of every sentence making it sound like a question when in fact it’s no-ot?

One half of the conversation, the one I can hear, goes like this:

“You’re going out with a rockstar. What do you expect - you’re going out with a ROCKSTAR.”

“OK… he’s going to teach you synthesizer. It’ll be alright.”

[Question to self: when is anything OK while learning the synthesizer?]

“How long is your brief?”

[How green is my valley – wasn’t that a TV series?]

“Is this your lunch hour? … I said you’re with A ROCKSTAR. How bad can it get?”

[Don’t ask. Pretty bad.]

She looks at another call coming in on her phone, while her girlfriend’s voice squeaks on for a bit. She puts the phone to her ear again,

“What do you expect. HE’S A ROCKSTAR!”

By now her computer is signalling that someone is trying to Skype her. There’s a chime and a whooshing sound effect. Obviously the girlfriend overhears this, as her mouse-like squeaking amplifies to something more like a large gerbil or a guinea pig.

“No, it’s not HIM. He doesn’t make phone calls. He’s a ROCKSTAR.”

The rising tone at the end of the sentence is coming in useful. I can sense the reason why call centre girls and dental receptionists are trained in the art of making every sentence like a pleasant question, when in fact the news is probably grim or at least foreboding.

“No. He DOESN’T know my number. He’s a ROCKSTAR. Get over it, dude.”

[small beep]

If she could have slammed the phone down, she would have.

In the old days it was much more satisfying to slam a receiver down than to fiendishly stab at the ‘end call’ button on a mobile phone, invariably stubbing a finger or not knowing exactly which button to stab at.

The bad-tempered phone jab has none of the physical force or audible crack of a receiver banging against its cradle. The lingering ring of the metal bell inside the phone you’ve just half-crucified. The fact that you can walk away from the phone, glancing black at the implacable dial, telling yourself you’re finished.

Nowadays - unless you’re Russell or Naomi, accustomed to launching your mobile at will - you’re a slave to it, and you have to sheepishly put it back on the table or in your pocket after a phone fracas. Half-hoping it’ll ring again so as you can have another go at the slamming thing. Or merely to remind you that you are still wanted – somehow, somewhere, by somebody. The pathos is excruciating.

The Goth girl checks she has pressed the correct button and goes back to ‘Cassowary Part II’.

All this time I’ve been thinking ‘zombie movie’, not ‘large flightless bird’.

*

On my left, a girl in a willowy dress is reading lines quietly while the guy sitting opposite her at the same table writes in a block of yellow legal lined paper. I try to work out if they are a couple - there are no tell-tale signs, but they look good together. The sun is streaming in through the high windows, and I can feel the tour slipping away.

Last night was the final show of the tour. Totally different from every other show in every other state. I lean back and savour the welcome I got from the staff at the club.

This welcome has been scientifically proven as imperceptible to any of the five human senses. Perhaps men in white coats have invented a machine which is positioned somewhere inside the Hubble telescope, focused on the infinitesimal shifts of particles millions of light years and trillions of centuries away from us here on Earth. Perhaps this machine could be realigned on central Los Angeles in order to try to detect some warmth in the welcome from the staff at this particular club. If it can find any, I would like to check the data.

I arrive on time and introduce myself to a barman who has napkin holders in his earlobes and sideburns cut to within an inch of his ears. He grunts in return, eyes staring straight ahead of him, his massive face wholly impassive. However, in comparison to the soundman, he is a blubbering idiot full of wet kisses and Stephen Fry style luvvie hugs.

Perhaps the machine in the Hubble is too crude an instrument to bring to bear upon the soundman. Perhaps in central Germany someone has invented a more soulful instrument of gradation. A facial movement detector, which can measure emotion by registering the slightest change in the molecules which go to make up a person’s facial expression. In this case, maybe they can send over one of these machines to run tests on our man on sound – JD - to see whether he feels any emotion whatsoever when talking to a fellow member of the human race.

To measure his welcome in terms of nano-microns would be to overstate the emotion in his greeting tonight. However, later in the evening I swear I see the corner of JD’s mouth curl ever so slightly as I effusively thank him for doing such a good job – or perhaps it was just the memory of an annoying fly which had landed there, only to be exterminated by thought transference.

The soundcheck is ends before it has begun. It exists purely in negative time. I remember from my last show here [Dear Reader – this is an important gig] that as soon as you say “Great” or “Sounds fine” or “Thanks” or anything positive, the soundcheck is over. I resolve to say nothing, climb the steps and set one foot on the stage. JD instantly fades up a hair metal anthem on the PA system, and the check is over.

However, despite this, JD is a master of his chosen art. His sound is tremendous, his talent unimpeachable, it’s just that sometimes you need a few minutes to relax, and get the feel of the stage.

Since persistence is often regarded as a virtue - and sometimes can cause an evening to change direction in unexpected ways - I ask the barman for a drink. He grunts in the direction of the soundman, flexing his lobe-based napkin rings in the process. When I turn to the soundman, he lets out an elongated sigh. I ask him if there’d be any chance of possibly having a drink if it isn’t too much trouble. Another sigh, then silence. I wonder if I’m in a workshop production of a long-lost Beckett play.

After this silence, accompanied by the dying last seventeen choruses of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’, there follows a silence filled with absolutely no sound - the ideal situation for JD. I notice he has personalised earplugs stuck in his designed lugs.

He digs in a drawer and pulls out a micropscopic red ticket. “This entitles you to one drink under the value of $6.” he says in the type of computer voice Radiohead would try to sample. He keeps looking straight ahead, past where I am standing. He tears the tiny ticket in half and I see that he has signed it one one side. He gives one half to the barman and one half to me. It’s like being in the follow up to ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’.

I look at the pricelist behind the bar. The cheapest drink costs $8.

*

I know how many tickets have been sold for tonight’s show. I know how many we have to sell in order to get paid. Every other concert on the tour you simply earn money when people show up - or you are promised a fee before you arrive. In this club, getting paid is a fata morgana at the end of a very long and very lonely tightrope walk. It’s the podium you know you can’t reach in your dream, it’s the wall you will never be able to build. You can see the bricks - but the wall you must build with them? It’s too high.

After the show, outside the front door, the man with the book of ticket stubs looks at me as if I have gatecrashed his wedding party branding a machine gun. “Who are you?” “I just played” “Oh, I think I owe you money then.” It’s a special moment, one I would like to prolong just a little. You see, if you sell over a certain number of tickets, you get a percentage of all the money that night, not just the amount you have exceeded the magic number by. If not, you get nothing.

“No,” he says, looking at the door tally, “I pay you nothing. Goodnight.”

*

As I said, playing LA is different from everywhere. - but I love walking working playing and thinking in this crazy inspiring city which everyone all around the world knows something about. Built out of sprinklers in a desert between the ocean and the mountains.

I am delighted that my publishers are here, and good friends too. There’s time to talk afterwards and then to go to eat Mexican in a place opposite the Casbah café where I am sitting now.

This is a place for writers. I don’t want to see the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard, just take me driving down the streets of James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Bukowski, John Fante. Tom… Waits.

Where a thousand scripts are being sweated over this very afternoon. Where typewriters have pounded for generations. Writers constructing the world’s impression of America out of images, fine phrases, fashion and special effects. The emotional mirror the world loves to hold up to itself. All this done constructed and worked upon with the help of strong men and beautiful women, some of whose descendants are in this very café, tapping and thinking and phoning and blogging and continuing to build this Babel out of a parched corner of Spanish desert.

As I leave, the girl with the willowy dress is tidying her things away. The guy opposite her nervously finishes what he’s writing on the yellow legal pad and gives it to her. She stops packing up, takes the sheet of paper and looks at him. Their eyes meet. It’s a moment from a movie.

Walking out of the Casbah I look up and see the HOLLYWOOD sign really is falling down. It says in the paper that Hugh Hefner bought it. At the lights I can see the Griffith Observatory where James Dean and Dennis Hopper ran to in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’.

The half-ounce of live ladybirds bought in a recycled yoghurt tub by a friend of mine to spread on the lettuces in her front garden so as they can eat the aphids are flying away to breathe their one day of freedom in peace, and I am on my journey back to Australia with a squeaking dog toy in my pocket. Changing season for season, springtime for autumn.

Here they call it the Fall. To follow will show you how far I fell on tour.

Stay tuned.

I always did like them American apples.