Southern European weather, beautiful, hot with a breeze, that’s Porto. Today was the exciting arrival of the annual fire extinguisher checking men. Not only were they coming at 2.30, but they were early, they took both the fire extinguishers to their van, came back satisfied and made me sign two forms, took 27 euros off us and said see you next year. The excitement was so much that I made toast.
I connected with my luthier Jorge in Gaia and Sarah and I went over there with the remains of what seems to be a banjo from the forties, and a wrecked Ibanez UE 405 foot switch with all the wires hanging out from the component and the pedal itself. It’s the kind of thing where I see disaster and Jorge sees solutions. He also has two of my acoustics and a bass that he is working on. One of the acoustics, a small Takamine 6-string was ready, it had been in storage, had cobwebs, rusty strings and a broken trim. The other acoustic, an Eston 12, was the guitar I used on Sleepy Metal Box on In Reflection (1984) – it had a broken headstock that was held on by the strings, I guess the massive crack in the back should have given it away.
We drove to Gaia with a man from Venezuela who supported Liverpool, didn’t really like The Beatles, but his favourite band was the Bee Gees. On the way back, it was a man who had watched the whole Game of Thrones series all the way through three times and House of the Dragon twice and was extremely excited by the coming new season. I only managed six seasons of Game of Thrones, I always watched it over dinner until one day I got sick of the cruelty and the decapitations putting me off my food.
Sarah has continued working on the boxes of records in The Archive, Olivia is working on the In Deep website and I’m lazing around drinking piña coladas, stroking my pet Persian and eating caviar sandwiches (it’s a Northern thing) but seriously, it’s non-stop here in music land. Trying to sort out our Arktik Lake mastering, a sesh today with Bob in Boston and a plan to get to a studio setup that never happened because we simply ran out of time.
Music today has been The Comsat Angels – Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones – The BBC Sessions 1979-1984 (1992), c/- Sarah who like me (and Salim) are big fans of this band.