Breathing calmed down so went for a short walk to the corner shop with Kid A where he bought a can of baked beans with his own cash.

Then we walked around the long block talking about how those beans are now his beans, what would happen to the beans if I reimbursed him with a bank transfer, what he could do with a bottomless backpack, the striking similarity between the Chinese lion adorning a neighbour’s drive wall and the Chinese lions outside the Chinese restaurant in Spilsby, and how Lime bikes are taking over the world.

Breathless!

A million housewives every day
Pick up a can of beans and say
“What an amazing example of
Synchronisation!”

Or in my case, “£1.59?! What a rip-off!”

Retreated to the relative safety of the bedroom where I’m finding solace with Radiohead and OK Computer on a loop.

An airbag saved my life

DUA LIPA'S TINY DESK CONCERTS

Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.

Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.

Love Again is my favourite.

She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.

JON BATISTE'S TINY DESK CONCERT

Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.

This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).

Don’t it make your soul shake?

ALICIA KEYS' TINY DESK CONCERT

If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.

This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.

We all just wanna be shown some love

LIVING AND BREATHING

I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.

Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009

Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.

All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.

By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.

My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!

At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.

Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.

One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.

I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.

This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.

Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.

Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,'” Welch sings in the chorus of “Between Two Lungs"

I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the sing is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.

No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last

I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.

It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.

Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.

Finally feel like I’m getting my breath back after four days of having trouble breathing in, wheezing and feeling like I’m emphyseming.

Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager.

I like some Oasis stuff, the early stuff. I like some woke stuff. This quote and picture are true enough and funny, though.

Never listened to Buffalo Tom’s eponymous first album before.

Produced by one Joseph Donald Mascis (as was their second album Birdbrain, although there he was credited as the more familiar J. Mascis).

When I first went to university, one of my first mates was a very quiet and shy bass player, a Geordie skinhead called Tim. Tim was into getting stoned and listening to Frank Zappa. I never got into Zappa. But I am now.

CURRICULUM VITAE (REPETITUM)

Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels.

Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths. Let’s never forget that killing is a sport for our aristocracy and their hangers-on. Famously, at the time, the host of these shootings was “peppered in the buttocks” by our drunken home secretary Willie Whitelaw. You couldn’t get away with a name like that now.

My brother graduated from bush beating for toffs to hunt sabotage.

I did well enough in my ‘O’ Levels (one A, eight Bs, and a C), that my maths teacher told me I would “never amount to anything”. He wasn’t wrong.

My dad tried to motivate me after my mock ‘A’ Level results by leaving me a drunken handwritten note and caricature drawing of me with an arrow pointing to it (I mean, in those days what else could he have done?) saying: “THICK CUNT”.

Then he got me what felt like a punishing summer job at the duck processing plant where he was a line supervisor. Being the boss’s son was no fun when they put me on the killing floor. I became a vegetarian for nine years after that (although since returned to meat eating - that’s another story).

I messed up my ‘A’ Levels (three Es, and failed General Studies writing about the punk band Stiff Little Fingers). I was profoundly depressed, but had no one to talk to about it. Mainly because I had been brought up not to talk about or express any “bad” or “difficult” feelings. Random people used to come up to me and say “Cheer up, it may never happen”, but it in my internal world, it already had.

Music, and playing guitar in a band, was my only outlet, but we were young and totally delusional. We were a three-piece, but believed we were the next Fab Four. We played a successful debut gig in Cleethorpes at The Sub, but instead of building on that, we immediately packed our bags and gear into a van, and drove to London to live in a series of squats in Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse.

An older ex-school friend was part of an anarchist community based out of a bookshop, and helped us find, gain entry to, and occasionally get the water, gas and/or electricity working. In those good old days, you could easily “sign on” the dole and get enough to actually live on.

I read and heard a lot about the politics of anarchism, which I found very attractive to my idealism. That said, I couldn’t ever see how it would work in practice, in the real world. It would need a revolution, of course, but even then, it would need a revolution in people’s minds and thinking first.

Six months living in squats, a couple of lousy gigs and a demo tape later, we packed our bags and returned home.

TOO MUCH PRESSURE

Inevitably, as I sit here in the cafe next to my son’s swimming lesson, unable to drink coffee because the cafe is permanently closed, my mind wanders and starts thinking about coffee.

For most of my adult life, I’ve started the day with a cup of tea. Regular English breakfast tea. PG Tips, Tetley. Milk and sugar.

Tea was always my preferred drink, but I did like a cup of instant coffee or two later in the morning, but only if it was one I liked. I wasn’t fond of Nescafe or the other regular blends.

A few years ago, I switched to Rooibos (redbush) tea, and never went back. I also started appreciating real coffee made on a French press, and later got my own Aeropress. What really sealed the coffee deal, was discovering fresh coffee beans that aren’t burnt (Pact Coffee).

About three years ago, I backed a Kickstarter campaign to build an affordable, portable espresso maker, CoffeeJack.

Now, I’m not one of those people who backs a lot of these types of things, although it wasn’t my first or last. I understand that it’s not like ordering from Amazon or anywhere else. You’re backing a project with money in the hope that it’s successful and that you end up with a product that works as described. There’s no guarantee.

Now, CoffeeJack delivered about three years after they got my money. Which is a long time! They had lots of problems along the way, including, of course, the covid pandemic. So fair play to them for getting their project finished at all. And it was worth the wait, in my opinion. They produced exactly what they promised, and for six months I had two cups a day of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted.

Sadly, just when I thought I’d cracked it, I cracked the bayonet on my CoffeJack. Too much pressure, to quote The Selector.

Big kid’s current favourite song.

My little lad’s current favourite song.

A NEW INGERLAND

Warming up for Ingerland’s opening match in the World Cup by practising penalties.

PUMP DOT IO

Muskovite Twitter’s demise is imminent.

Everyone’s go-to Twitter-alternative place of refuge Mastodon is swamped with an invasion of Tweeters seeking a better life.

What better time for a reprise of Pump Dot IO?

Wife: “I don’t like the words. I don’t like the music. You sound like a hooligan. I couldn’t care less about fucking Jimmy Carter.”

Teaching REM’s The One I Love to 7 yr old.

Had to change the words to ‘The One-Eyed Bug’.

Are you listening to Joy Division?

NO ONIONS, BUT PLENTY OF FIREWORKS WITH BIER

Abstract: Gertcha by the wiener. Tags: fireworks, photos, video, bier, Chas ‘n’ Dave, hot dogs

Last night, eight of us from Enfield Clubhouse went to Alexandra Palace to see London’s largest and most popular fireworks display. Here’s a video I took. The fireworks were pretty and spectacular - worth seeing, if you like that kind of thing!

After the fireworks, we climbed up the hill to the Palace itself and queued to get into the German Bier Festival. To call it a Festival is really a big overstatement. It’s a few years since I went to a beer festival and it was most likely Up North in deepest, darkest Bury, Lancashire, or somewhere like that. Maybe they do them differently Down South, but this was a bit of a let down. One tiny little bar, like you might find in a marquee at a modern marketed music festival. One brand of German Bier - Paulaner - and only two varieties: Munich and Weiss. The Weiss was off by the time I had been pushed and shoved forward by the ten deep bar queue. If you didn’t fancy Paulaner Munich, you could have that old Bavarian favourite, Foster’s. And they insisted on calling it Bier, which makes me wonder how authentic it really was. Not that authenticity seemed to be high on the agenda as it was all served in the obligatory health and safety plastic beakers.

So, we all got beer and seats in the Great Hall by which time a bunch of Cockney Irish fiddlers and banjoists started murdering Pogues' classics, much to the delight of the mostly student audience who I’m sure were out of their minds by now. Not that it stopped one of the thieving little tykes nicking my beer when I laid it down to rest and turned my back for five minutes.

What followed is a little hazy - maybe the bier was real, after all.

I fear that I may have danced to Chas But Not Dave or Chas And His Band or whatever Chas ‘n’ Dave are now known as. I was a little disturbed by the large, bald bass player, especially when he kept repeating ‘Gertcha!’ like an overly loud belch, totally drowning out scrawny-looking Chas on vocals.

To make matters worse, on leaving, I stopped for a Hot Dog.

‘Sorry, no onions’ said the serving assistant.

‘Oh, that’s a shame. I like onions on my Hot Dog. So. They are £3.00 with onions, right?’

‘That’s right, sir, but we don’t have any onions left.’

‘No, you don’t. So, if it’s £3.00 with onions… how much is it for a Hot Dog without onions?’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

By this time I was already in full Basil Fawlty mode.

‘I’d like a discount, please. If it’s £3.00 for a Hot Dog with onions, then I’d like 20% off for a Hot Dog without onions.’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘How can it be the same price, with or without onions?’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘So, can I have a discount, then or not? I’m willing to pay £2.40 for a Hot Dog without onions. If only you’d removed the empty onion trays and not told me you had no onions I’d never have known. Or you could scrape up the remaining slivers and let me have those….’

Now, I felt like Yossarian in Catch-22 trying to get out of the Air Force by being crazy, but being told that he couldn’t be crazy because he wanted to leave. And only a sane man would want to leave.

‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t give a discount. I just work here. It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘You could give me a discount if you wanted to. I’m sure you could.’

The guy (no pun intended) behind me piped up, offering to call the Office Of Fair Trading. I suggested that they might want to consult the Sale Of Consumer Goods Act.

‘I can’t give a discount, sir. It’s £3.00, with or without onions.’

‘OK, I give in. I’ll have a Hot Dog without onions for £3.00.’

‘You have to pay first, sir.’

‘What?! But you just gave him one! He hasn’t paid yet!’

‘I’m sorry, sir. You have to pay first and then I’ll give you the Hot Dog.’

A young American woman approached me.

‘Please stop harassing my staff, sir.’

‘What?! Harassing your staff?! You’ve got to be joking?!’

‘No, sir. You’re harassing my staff. Now, please stop it or I will have to call Security to come and remove you.’

‘All I want is a Hot Dog with onions for £3.00 as advertised. If you don’t have onions, then fine, I’ll buy a bareback Hot Dog for £2.40.’

‘Sir, you can buy a Hot Dog without onions for £3.00 or go without.’

‘Why can’t you give me a discount?’

‘I only work here, sir. I can’t give you a discount.’

‘Hang on. I thought you were in charge? Surely you can use your discretion and keep your customers happy? I just spent plenty of money tonight on donating to the cost of the fireworks display and buying beer for me and my friends.’

‘What’s your problem, mate?’ asked a student grumpily and who looked like he had dyed his original wiry ginger hair black. ‘It says Hot Dogs £3.00. Doesn’t say anything about onions.’

‘No, I know it doesn’t say anything about onions. That’s a very good point. And that’s why I’m not going to engage you in any further conversation. Enjoy your Hot Dog! Thank you all and goodnight.’

Thanks also, to Lee, Gemma, Michael, Atul, Dan, Raheem and Angelina for making it a fun night out. And my apologies for any offence caused to the Hot Dog stand workers.

(THERE'S ONLY ONE) JIMMY CARTER (THE FOOTBALLER, NOT THE PEANUT FARMER)

A long time ago, back in January 2010 in fact, Dan Lynch’s band 20lb Sounds released their song Jimmy Carter (20lb Sounds) / CC BY-SA 3.0:

This is our first original release. It’s called Jimmy Carter and as you might expect it’s about… well… Jimmy Carter, the former US president. We didn’t set out to write a song about him particularly, it’s just that someone came out with the line “Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer”, and it had to be put into song. After a quick trawl of his Wikipedia page we were turning up all sorts of gems. Such as Jimmy Carter is the cousin of Motown Records supremo Berry Gordy, he’s also won a Nobel Peace prize and even a Grammy award. Mad huh?

All those nuggets of trivia found their way into the lyrics. It was originally just the main riff but then other sections were written to make it a bit more interesting as a full song. It’s hard to know what to describe this as, it’s almost country blues, but somehow not. There’s a bit of harmonica thrown in there so watch out for that too. You can’t beat the old gob iron.

This is licensed under CC BY-SA because it’s our own original work. You can download it, share it with friends, give out CDs and generally help us spread this music as far as possible. We need your help to make this work.

Enjoy!

I have been enjoying it ever since. One thing perturbed me, though: Dan is a Liverpudlian and supports Liverpool Football Club. Surely the song should have been about the one time Liverpool footballer Jimmy Carter and not the former US president?

As the song is released under a Creative Commons licence, I realised I could rewrite the lyrics and do my own version. And here it is, my tribute to Jimmy Carter the ex-footballer, based on his Wikipedia entry:

(There’s Only One) Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is an ex-footballer
He made his name in south east London
Signed for Millwall from Queen’s Park Rangers
He ran down the wings in tight short trousers

There’s only
One Jimmy
One Jimmy Carter! 

Jimmy is a man with honours
He won Division Two with the Lions
But the winning stopped when he signed for the Scousers
King Kenny’s dream turned Sourpuss nightmare

So Jimmy signed for his boyhood heroes
But his Arsenal days would soon be numbered
He went out on loan to Oxford United
While the Gunners’ team won three cups without him 

There’s only
One Jimmy
One Jimmy Carter!

Then Jimmy moved and played for Pompey
But they were shit and there were no more trophies
Back at the Den for one last shot at glory
Jimmy hurt his back and it was end of story

There’s only
One Jimmy
One Jimmy Carter!

Whatever happened to Jimmy Carter?
You can still buy his print for less than a tenner
And with the change you can get his football sticker
And sing with me ‘There’s only one Jimmy Carter!’

There’s only
One Jimmy
One Jimmy Carter!

Enjoy!