Reading all the furore about WikiLeaks and its mysterious frontman Julian Assange, I feel compelled to tell this story about a recent dinner conversation I had with with him.

It was at a private ‘do’ at a restaurant in Oxford right after TEDGlobal earlier this month. Julian slipped in to the party uninvited, plonked himself down opposite me and ordered some fish. Just that morning he’d given a candid interview to Chris Anderson on the TED stage in which he’d quite convincingly defended Wikileaks and its right/obligation to publish leaked military secrets that, some could argue, put lives and reputations in unnecessary peril. A cloak of secrecy surrounded his visit to the conference and even the TED production team had been kept in the dark about the identity of our surprise final day guest.

Julian Assange is a slender 6′ Australian with a flock of white hair. He cuts a striking figure in a white dress shirt, sneakers and jeans. It struck me that this charismatic guy who’s Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of several large and deadly organisations — not least the CIA — might do better to dye his hair brown and wears specs and an anorak. Sitting across the table from him, I half expected to see a tiny red laser dot dancing across his white shirt. In fact, if you’re going to stick around overnight in a city where you just made a controversial public appearance that was instantly tweeted all over the blogosphere, why not just paint a big red target on your back?

I asked him if he fears for his life. “All the time,” he said, “but if it comes I hope it comes quickly”. (I’m recalling this as accurately as I can.) “Just today after my interview at the Playhouse Theatre, I walked down the street to my hotel, tightly surrounded by a crowd of people wanting to congratulate me, or heckle me or whatever. I got to the concierge desk. As I was waiting to pick up my bag I felt a strange itch on the back of my neck. I felt for it and shit! it was a Band-Aid I’d never seen before. Christ, I thought, this is not good, this could be the bloody end right here, and I looked around for someone scurrying off into the shadows. Did I feel okay? yes, but…. then I realised. It was the sticky tape from the wireless headset microphone I’d just worn for the TED interview.”

Julian Assange left our post-TED party and reportedly gatecrashed another, leaving that one early by the emergency exit, setting off the alarm, choosing a dark back alley to make his escape in preference to the brightly lit Oxford main road. He says WikiLeaks is underfunded. I only hope the company has room in its budget for a little Kevlar in its CEO’s wardrobe.

A belated note about the latest Prefab Sprout album, ‘Let’s Change The World With Music’, which was released a few weeks ago. It has a curious history. Paddy McAloon wrote the songs at the beginning of the 90s, intending to make a follow-up album to 1990′s ‘Jordan: The Comeback’. As he liked to do, Paddy made demos of all the songs in his home studio, and sent them both to me and to the band’s record company, Sony. I immediately fell in love with the songs, especially ‘Ride Home To Jesus’ and ‘I Love Music.’ I was keen to produce them and we’d started to make plans. However Sony’s head of A+R, Muff Winwood, who had always been a huge supporter of the Sprouts, was a bit negative about the album, saying that the religious overtones of many of the songs would create a perception of a ‘Christian rock’ band, which would destroy their credibility and commercial appeal. He was very aware that U2 had narrowly dodged a bullet round about the time of songs like ‘Pride (In The Name Of Love)’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ when many accused them of veering towards ‘God Rock’—even though those titles were referring to something completely different.

Ultimately it didn’t do U2 any harm though, did it. And Paddy’s songs were not actually promoting God or religion. If anything they were an analysis of faith and integrity. They seemed to aspire to a love of something above, beyond ourselves. In ‘Music Is A Princess’, for example, the author characterises himself as a lowly boy in rags, willing to die for Music but unworthy to carry her flag. In ‘Ride’, Paddy praises people who work thanklessly for the greater good. I thought the songs were excellent, with great chords and melodies, and it was  very refreshing to hear some subject matter that wasn’t just about sex, relationships,  money or starvation. But the band felt unable to deal with the friction caused by the record company’s push-back, and Paddy decided to move right on and start from scratch. I believe Muff Winwood has since claimed that he only wanted a few changes to the words and titles and perhaps the addition a couple of extra songs that were not so controversial.

It’s easy in retrospect to say that the original decision not to release ‘Let’s Change The World With Music’ did irreperable damage to the band’s career. Certainly it threw a spanner in the works, because the next twelve years saw only two more Sprouts albums, neither of which approached the critical or commercial success of their previous four. There were several other song projects that never got off the ground, including a musical about Zorro and an album of Michael Jackson-themed songs. Paddy or his managers at Kitchenware would send me the tapes and I always enjoyed them and was impressed by how good his home studio recordings were becoming.

During those years, which also ushered in the era of Internet music and self-publishing by artists, I repeatedly told Paddy I thought he should ditch his major label contract altogether and just release his stuff himself via the Net. His output was so prolific that he could easily have released two or three albums per year, maintained a great mailing list (his brother Martin having become something of a Web expert), and made a perfectly good living without any interference from A+R men and radio promotion people. But he is quite conservative in his view of the music business, and always felt that success had to include the conventional trimmings of commercial acceptance, like seeing your poster in the window of WHSmiths, getting played on BBC Radio 1, and so on. He’s perfectly entitled to cling to that view. In this day and age though, what’s survived of the Industry star machinery is reserved for celebrity-hungry 20-something hotties that can sing, dance and disrobe like world champs. Paddy’s health is not good and he’s in no mood to be out there under the spotlights, so perhaps now he will reconsider my suggestion and make some new music to release softly on the Internet for the legions of devoted Sprouts fans to enjoy.

A couple of years ago Keith Armstrong, the Sprouts’ manager, talked Paddy into the idea of reviving ‘Let’s Change The World With Music’ and releasing it independently. With the help of engineer Callum Michael, Paddy cleaned up the recordings and replaced a few parts, though he stuck with the original vocals. It’s a pretty sweet-sounding record. Of course, I feel it would have been even better if the mainly programmed backing could have been replaced Martin, Wendy Smith and Neil Conti, and the whole package produced by me. After all it’s been billed as a Prefab Sprout album, not a solo project like Paddy’s beautiful ‘I Trawl The Megahertz.’ But this release needed to be swift and the costs kept low. One of the challenges of the new music business landscape is how to pull off a project that requires several musicians and expensive recording studios, without going heavily into debt with a label who will then demand their pound of flesh in return. There’s not really a new system in place for compensating musicians and producers without incurring the huge ridiculous costs of accounting and royalty calculations.

Still, what we’re left with is a gorgeous piece of work. I’m really glad it saw the light of day, and hope that its warm reception from fans and critics alike will encourage Paddy to do some new work, despite the problems he’s having with his hearing and eyesight. If you want to feel inspired, just read his sleeve notes, about Brian Wilson and ‘The yawning caves of blue.’ He’s a brilliant writer and would make a fine novellist. There’s a very candid interview with him transcribed here which explains the album much better than I can. Do seek it out if you can. I notice it’s not on iTunes for some reason but it is on Amazon.

Announcing:

THOMAS DOLBY AND FRIENDS: Circumnavigating ‘The Flat Earth.’
Union Chapel, Islington, London
Feb 28th, 2010

The other night I met up for a drink with my friends from the Flat Earth live band I took with me on my world tour in 1983-84–Justin Hildreth, Lyndon Connah, Matthew Seligman, and Lesley Fairbairn. We thought it would be fun to get back together and play for one night. It was great when Matthew and Kevin Armstrong joined me onstage at the Academy a couple of years ago, and this would be the full touring band. A quick email round to Chucho Merchan, Debra Barsha and Kevin confirmed that everyone was up for it.

But instead of a yet another 80s reunion, I thought we could do something a little more contemporary, a little more Reality TV. So here’s the plan. We won’t rehearse the show at all. Instead, we’ll meet up onstage, completely unrehearsed. We’ll re-learn songs like ‘Hyperactive’, ‘Windpower’, ‘I Scare Myself’ and ‘One Of Our Submarines’, chatting and telling stories as we go. It’ll be very interactive and the audience can chime in with questions, comments and requests, like a cross between a masterclass and a talk show. And I’ll try to arrange some cameo walk-on appearances from celebrated musicians I’ve worked with over the years. At the end of the evening we’ll play a short set of the songs we’ve practiced, back-to-back.

With the help of promoter Adrian Gibson, I have booked the Union Chapel in Islington for the evening of February 28th 2010. This is a lovely venue with seating for around 700 and a somewhat wrap-around stage which I feel will give a warm atmosphere for the show. It’ll be quite an early start, with 2 to 2.5 hrs for rehearsing and chat, followed by a break and then a short concert set.

The Union Chapel ‘gig’ will round out an exciting weekend for Dolby afficionados: the previous night, Feb 27th, there will be a show in Aldermaston by excellent duo The Pirate Twins, who could loosely be regarded as a ‘tribute band.’ I saw these guys play once before at a semi-secret 50th birthday bash, but since then they’ve expanded their repertoire and they will be performing The Golden Age Of Wireless in its entirety. They do an amazing job of re-creating my sounds and production, but many of their arrangements go beyond that as they explore ideas that my originals only hinted at. I decided to make my show the same weekend as theirs, because I know that a lot of fans and Forum members will be traveling specially for that show. Between the GAOW performance on Saturday and ‘Circumnavigating The Flat Earth’ on Sunday, it’ll be quite an action-packed 48 hrs. There’s more info about The Pirate Twins gig here.

I’m wide open to ideas for the show, so feel free to post your comments below!

About fifteen years ago, a new song popped into my head. It had a title, a melody, and a handful of lyrics. It had a faintly Brazilian feel to the rhythm and the harmonies. The title was Simone. It seemed to be about a woman who left her partner and escaped to some exotic location.

But the chorus was lacking a punchline. If I was going to sing her name several times, I needed to tell Simone something. There was no message to give her. The atmosphere was certainly there; yet to keep it from lapsing into it ‘lounge’ territory, it needed an ironic twist. And every time I tried to sit at the piano and play it, I got lost in the chord sequence. It seemed that every few bars there were several different ways for the chords to modulate. I would pick a given key to start in, but when I got back to the next verse I’d be in a completely different key. It was a musical Rubik’s Cube, and it was frustrating me. So over the years, I never made progress with the song.

This happens from time to time. There are remnants of unfinished songs in my closet. Not many, maybe a dozen over the 35 years I’ve been a songwriter. Usually if they never get finished, it’s because there wasn’t enough substance to begin with. But in the case of Simone, it bothered me. A lot. There was something fantastic about the song, and it kept nagging me. It would come back to haunt me every couple of years; I’d sit at the piano and try to play it, but I’d end up just as confused.

This is not like me! I usually have a very good sense of orientation with melodies and chord sequences. I can bend music and lyrics until they make sense. But with this piece of fiction, it took a slice of real life to bring me to a place where I could complete the song. Someone I’m close to told me they have gender dysphoria. (S)he felt a transition was taking place. This news was astonishing, and more than a little frightening. I found it hard to process. Looking back, I realised I could have seen this coming.

But it brought me back to my song. What if Simone was previously Simon? She was running away from her former, male self? Suddenly I had unlocked the riddle, I’d found the ironic twist I was looking for. I went for a long walk across the marshes, which is where I usually come up with my best lyrics, and I found the punchline I was lacking for the chorus.

‘You’re like a timebomb in his blood.’

With its new ambiguity, the plot line opened up many possibilities for a backstory with lots of tasty lyrical details. The next missing piece was the chord sequence. I thought hard about why I was unable to get my head around it. I decided it was the malleable and jazzy nature of Brazillian chords that was throwing me. So finally I tried something I’ve never done before: I sang the melody unaccompanied, and added the chords afterwards, as if I was voicing someone’s instrumental solo. What I ended up with was very curious: each of the three verses, and each double part of the song’s three choruses, is in a different key. I wrote down a chart for the chords, but I still can’t play them straight through without referring to it. How am I ever going to do this song live?

Happily the musicians I worked with are able to read pretty fluently, so armed with the chord chart (and with editing help from my friend Chucho Merchan) I put down a version with acoustic guitar, drums, percussion and upright bass. They did a grand job of negotiating their way around the tricky chords. It took me a few weeks to sift through the performances, but last night I finished a version (still absent a lead vocal) that I can finally call a complete song. As I often do, I emailed myself an MP3 from the lifeboat studio, so I could listen to it on my laptop speakers this morning.

I woke up today, did some chores, returned a few emails, played a little online Scrabble with my friend Rachel, and gave the song a listen. It’s damn good! How satisfying to have finally brought it to life after all these years.

And as a final ironic twist, I turned on the TV as I ate my breakfast, and what did I find? a 2002 movie starring Al Pacino as a Hollywood mogul who invents a computer-generated female movie star called…. ? S1m()ne.

When I occasionally need to record a group of musicians I don’t have room to do it in my lifeboat studio, the Nutmeg. I have to go and rent a studio elsewhere. Trouble is, I’m very hard to please in that department. When I lived in LA, Bill Bottrell introduced me to the delights of vintage Neve mixing consoles, and I was hooked. The mixer is the heart of a studio and directly affects the sound of a record, and these just have a great sound that’s all their own. Twiddling their knobs is like tuning a beautiful guitar. There are a handful of enthusiasts in California that own and maintain these old lovelies that had their heyday in the 1970s—the era of Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Nile Rogers—but most commercial studios have long since replaced them with newer, more powerful, but much less delightful Neves or Solid State Logic mixers. Bill single handedly changed the face of American music production when he recorded Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club on his old Neve in a vacant shop (!) in Pasadena in the early 90s. This album was raw and gritty and the arrangements stood up for themselves. It won several Grammys and signalled the end to 80s production excess (you know, ultra-compressed tracks running through giant automated SLL desks with big snares and tones of digital reverb, kinda like my productions for Prefab Sprout!)

But I’m very pleased to have found a little recording studio in East London (the right end for me) called The Way that owns one of only two left in Great Britain. It’s a custom 8078, 40-input board that lived at Sony’s studios in Tokyo for many years. It’s manned by an enthusiastic young staff who have inherited the passion for this board.

I just spent 20 hours recording a small Latin ensemble there, consisting of upright bass (Chucho Merchan), drums (Nic France), percussion (Bosco De Oliveira) and acoustic guitar (John Paricelli). I’ve had this strange song in my head for about ten years now, and in my imagination it was always played by a Latin quartet. It’s called ‘Simone’. It’s a dreamy slow groove that belongs in the ‘Oceanea’ section of my album. It has a simple melody but an odd Brazilian chord sequence, which is not my forte at all. Over the years I would sing it occasionally to myself in the shower, walking on the beach, or falling asleep; but on the occasions I’ve tried to work it out on the piano it’s always perplexed me. It modulates every few bars. Not only that, there are different options for each modulation. Each section is in a completely different key, so every time I would arrive back at the verse, I had to relearn the complicated chords. And I’d usually just say, fuck it I’ll go and make a cup of tea.

Well, I decided ten years was long enough for this puzzle to remain uncracked so I took the plunge and booked these musicians into The Way, giving myself two weeks to unravel the mysteries of the song. In the end I decided to run a click and just sing the melody, then work out the chords to go along with it. It was like solving a Rubik’s Cube–no, a Rubik’s Polyhedron. I finally managed this in the nick of time, and sent Chucho a demo so he could chart it out for the other guys, not being a reader myself. We came together in the studio for the first time and recorded the song, finishing up about 4.30am this morning. I think it sounds fantastic, and they gave me something I could never program in a million years. We also did a second song, ‘A Jealous Thing Called Love’ which I played on my last tour.

On aspect of modern recording versus the ‘old days’ is that you can do unlimited takes and record endless tracks. Before, you had to make decisions and choices as you went along: let’s say you had a near-perfect conga take with a couple of stray hits out of place, you would painstakingly go through and identify the bad bits, then ‘punch in’ ie get the conga player to repair the bad hits on the fly. Now you just let them slip by, knowing you can later do a composite of several takes, cut and paste a good section from elsewhere, or even physically move each hit forward or back a few milliseconds in time until it sits right in the song. While this is great because the real premium is the musicians’ time, plus the hours spent in a for-rent studio, the downside is that for every hour I spent at The Way I will probably spend half a day in the Nutmeg editing what I recorded! So I won’t know the true value of what I captured for another two or three weeks. It’s all very well to just let the musicians go wild while trying out different tones and EQs, but in the back of my mind I cold see myself sitting there in the Nutmeg for hours on end, looking out over the sea, playing god while I move huge chunks of multirack audio around in time, making it all groove perfectly. Still this is infinitely preferable to me than twiddling knobs on a synth or tweaking MIDI notes in Logic.

Anyway, here’s a cameraphone snap of me with the venerable 8078. I’m sure to most of you it looks just like any other mixing board. But to those in the know, this is like a vintage Bentley.

Some pics from TEDGlobal in Oxford last week, copyright TED/ James Duncan Davidson.

Imogen Heap turns the audience into a human looping machine while jamming on the Hang drum.

Matthew White, euphonium impresario

Sophie Hunger, Swiss singer-songriter

The Radio Science Orchestra. Centre is Lydia Kavina, niece of Leon Theremin. To right is Bruce Woolley. I later joined them for my song Puls Kosmosa.

It’s been an intimate meeting here in Oxford, a bit like a return to the pre-Long Beach days in Monterey, when the audience was small enough that you made new friends early on and bumped into them repeatedly over the next few days. Yet the range of speakers has been fantastically diverse, and the music program at TEDGlobal 2009 has been one of the most eclectic ever. I don’t have many photos yet but

We kicked off with Matthew White, an amazing young euphonium player called Matthew White. He was trained in classical and the Northern brass band tradition, but he’s reinventing the instrument and evolving new techniques such as the ability to play intervals by blowing and singing at the same time. He’s also impressively fast and accurate with his streams of staccato notes. He was a big hit in the opening session, so we asked him back for a quick reprise on Day 2. I asked him on the mic what popped into his mind when he heard he would be going on right after Stephen Fry, and before Gordon Brown. He thought about it and then said: ‘I’ve peaked!’

The second morning featured a great performance by Imogen Heap. She’s performed at TED before, but that was 4 years ago with Frou Frou and her former partner Guy Sigsworth before she was doing all the technology herself. In the interim she’s become a phenomenon of the Internet music era. She’s never cracked the Billboard charts, or been on the cover of Rolling Stone; yet she’s spent over 18 months at #1 in the iTunes electronica downloads, and she has over 3/4 million followers on Twitter. When she wants to do a public appearance she just calls for a flash mob, and an hour later there’s a line around the block. She’s just completed her new album Ellipse, which I think is her best yet. This was her first live perfomance since finishing the album, and she hasn’t yet figured out how to perform the songs live: so she played one new song on the piano (‘Wait It Out’) and treated us to a couple of her best-known songs that she created entirely from scratch. One was ‘Just For Now’ which she builds up and down using a looper. Then she gave us the iconic ‘Hide And Seek’ with its lush vocals and memories of a troubled childhood. This made my wife Kathleen very sad because our daughter Harper sang and played it to us the day before she left home last month. I, of course, was too busy trying to work out the voicings she was using to control her Harmonizer.

Sophie Hunger is an interesting singer-songwriter from Switzerland who gave us a taste of her passionate and rather sombre music, accompanied by two acoustic guitars and a rather amazing trombone player who made great use of an antique Harmon mute as used by the big bands of the 1930s and ’40s.

Emanuel Jal was a warchild in Sudan who spent many of his childhood years toting a machine gun to avenge his village which was ransacked and destroyed. He was determined to kill as many Muslims and Arabs and he could; yet before long he found himself playing music and jamming with his former enemies which brought about his change of heart. He walked hundreds of miles with other refugee kids, most of whom didn’t make it out alive. He was eventually smuggled out of the country with no papers by a benevolent woman who has since died. Having survived the horrors of his childhood, he has now dedicated himself to doing something to help the next generation of kids in his home country, and he is speaking and rapping his way around the world raising money to build a school. His moving story brought many TEDsters to tears, and he has since received pledges of all sorts of help with his project, ranging from cash to designer chairs to free translations.

Eric Lewis returned for another late night piano session. As controversial as ever, he seems to split audience opinion down the middle—some think he’s reinventing jazz piano, while others feel he’s about as relevant to art as Liberace.

Radio Science Orchestra, Bruce Woolley’s unusual ensemble featuring harp, flute, Beamz and electronics, performed an homage to their favourite heroes and recurring themes like Leon Theremin, Sputnik, and Dr Who. The featured soloist was thereminist Lydia Kavina, niece of the great man himself who lives in Oxford. They also reprised my song Puls Kosmosa which I wrote for the Sputnik and Beyond performance at the ICA in 2007, and Bruce and I duetted on the Russian lyrics, co-written and translated for me by Melissa Jordan and now tweaked by Lydia for Communist-era folk authenticity.

Last night’s bonus session which was held not in the Playhouse but in the gorgeous Sheldonian Theatre. To open the proceedings, Felix’ Machines rattled and sang a delightful overture. Felix builds them painstakingly in his bedroom, and programs them from his laptop in Logic Studio. I love the way they make music that a machine would actually make. It would be easy enough to program them to imitate the kind of electronic music you hear everywhere. Instead Felix has created a whole new vocabulary for his machines that is interesting and mesmerising at the same time.

As TED’s music director I have the enviable task of selecting the musicians that appear here, and helping them tune their performances to fit the context. It’s an honour for me and for the musicians that play here to be able to add a little fairy dust that help these amazing ideas grow. TED’s truly making waves around the world now. If you have suggestions for musical acts that we should consider please send them to thomas at ted.com

We’ve got one final surprise in store for this the final morning of TED. I don’t want to be a spoiler so I’ll add a footnote about it later!

FOOTNOTE:

The final musical surprise was a return to the stage by Imogen Heap, who (having sent most of her gear home to Essex) used the audience as a human looping machine and three sections of us vocal lines to loop for her while she improvised over the top with hang drum rhythms and vocalising! Eyes closed, totally in the moment, summing up our feelings about the whole week in a single chant. I was so proud of her!

And just to end on a geeky note: I loved this WW2 German cipher machine that was part of the set!

It looks like EMI Canada is releasing GAOW and TFE Collectors Edition CDs on August 10th. Still no plan for EMI USA to release them physically, but I am actively looking for another US label to license them.

I’m here in Oxford where TEDGlobal 2009 is about to get underway. The stage at the Playhouse looks beautiful. It’s a cosy theatre, more like our old one in Monterey than the new one in Long Beach. Oxford is my old stomping ground—my dad’s old office was at the Ashmolean Museaum across the street, and we had drinks last night overlooking his old college, Lincoln. During the school holidays I used to take the bus in to meet him at the Wimpey Bar round the corner for a cheeseburger: an exciting innovative food import back then in the ’60s and ’70′s, though Americans would probably have choked on the Wimpey version. Last night a friend and I ducked under the Bridge of Sighs and down a dark alleyway to the Turf Tavern, where one almost expects to see Sebastian slumped in a corner with his teddy bear.

I’ll be interested this year to meet the TED Fellows, a group of forward-thinking young people from around the world who are invited to attend TED on a kind of scholarship, and bring their unique talents and ideas into the mix. The quality and diversity is off the charts—here’s an example of one CV that caught my eye!

Rachel Armstrong is a medical doctor with qualifications in general practice, a multi-media producer, a science fiction author and an arts collaborator whose current research explores the possibilities of architectural design and mythologies about new technology. Rachel is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing “metabolic materials” in an experimental setting. These materials possess some of the properties of living systems and couple artificial structures to natural ones in the anticipation that our buildings will undergo an “origins of life”-style transition from inert to living matter and become part of the biosphere. By generating metabolic materials, it is hoped that cities will be able to replace the energy they draw from the environment, respond to the needs of their populations and eventually become regarded as “alive” in the same way that we think about parks or gardens. Since metabolic materials are made from terrestrial chemistry, they are not exclusive to First World countries and have the potential to transform urban environments worldwide.

I’ve been a bad blogger the last couple of weeks. It’s been a busy time: I’m leaving today for Oxford where TEDGlobal 2009 runs July 21st-24th. As TED’s music director (great gig!) I contact, book and organise the musicians who play between speakers over the four days of TED. This year we’ve got some great music, including Sophie Hunger, Radio Science Orchestra, and Imogen Heap; also a teenage euphonium virtuoso, an East African war child-turned-rapper, and Felix’ Machines which are mechanical marvels that play gorgeous sequenced music using found car parts, piano hammers and LEDs. Looking forward to seeing my old friend and former percussionist Clif Brigden will be there DJing the whole event. And Kathleen has a full TED ticket this year, which she says she values more than any vacation anywhere in the world.

My son Graham just made his music festival debut at Latitude with his bin drumming group Bin There Drummed That. Sixteen kids dance around a circle and bang the heck out of plastic wheelie bins. He’s off for his second day there. Last night he witnessed a Patrick Wolf set, much to the annoyance I am sure of his older sibling Harper, now in the US, who is PW’s biggest fan and has photos of him plastered all over her bedroom wall. (Her annoyance will increase Tuesday when Graham and Talia get to see a live talk at TED by her other big hero, Stephen Fry. Thank heavens Eddie Izzard turned TED down–Harper would have committed harikiri.)

I’ve been digging Imogen Heap’s new album ‘Ellipse’ the last few days. It won’t be out for a few weeks but she was good enough to send me one (replete with with one of the infamous seals with my name on!) Some really fantastic tracks on there–my faves so far are Little Bird and Bad Body Double–all recorded by Immi herself in her lovely Georgian oval house, and extensively blogged, vlogged and tweeted about in every detail.

I’m writing this while I wait for my hard drive to back up so I can head off to the railway station. After Oxford I’m heading up to Scotland to do some recording with Eddi Reader, one of my favourite singers on the planet. I don’t know yet what key she’s going to want to sing in, so I have to bring a mini Logic setup, which I was preparing this week. In the midst of all this I had a complete computer meltdown and though my album material is all safely backed up, I lost a couple of applications for which I now can’t find the disks. This could have caused a problem for my Eddi sessions were it not for Eric Persing of Spectrasonics who kindly offered to FedEx me a new set of Omnisphere disks in Oxford, using my old serial number. So kind of him!

After Eddi I’m staying in Scotland for the National Championships of my yacht racing class the Loch Long One Design. I’ll be staying with the class Commodare on the shores of the Clyde, and crewing on #141 Fiona as the seaworthy English take on the fearsome Scots. Then August it’s back to work on my album in the Nutmeg of Consolation, as I try to pass the elusive notional halfway mark.

Yesterday was Lunesse’s birthday, my fabulous web mistress and Forum moderator. Happy Birthday darling!