I attended a charity event a couple of nights ago to celebrate the unveiling of the Keiskamma Altarpiece at Southwark Cathedral in London. This giant tapestry was made over several years by villagers in a small community in South Africa where an HIV AIDS centre is trying to raise money for retardant drugs. It’s a stunning piece, about thirteen feet high by twenty two feet wide, in a kind of tryptych configuration where ‘leaves’ unfold to reveal more scenes. It’s a stunning example of African folk art made up of crochet, wire, beads and string. The ladies who made it were there singing and chanting for us, and Ruby Wax led a silent auction to raise money for their centre.

Then we sat down for dinner in a nearby club called Clink, which I remember from the days when it was a grotty band rehearsal space! So much of London has changed beyond recognition since I was a kid. Seated at my  my table were old friends and new: John Reynolds, drummer and producer (and partner of Sinead O’Connor), who played in my first band Amberband when we were both 15; Claire Kenny, a long-time bassist friend; Kevin Armstrong, guitarist and current collaborator; and Brian Eno, whom I finally got to meet after all these years. My admiration for Brian and my musical debt to him are well documented elsewhere, but suffice to say it was a terrific honour and pleasure for me.

If you’re anywhere near London please take a stroll through the lovely Southwark Cathedral and check out this altarpiece!

I scored these splendid steampunk binoculars on eBay today for £46. They are quite large, measuring over 10 inches when fully extended. According to the seller they were handed down from his grandfather, and they once belonged to one of the crew on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that saved 705 people from the sinking Titanic. Of course it’s hard to prove the provenance but it’s a nice story and I’m sticking with it.

I’m going to mount them on the ceiling of the wheelhouse control room in my lifeboat studio, using a concertina scissor mechanism. This will give me a sweeping view of the North Sea, where yachts frequently founder on the shallow sandbanks. Sweet!

Rumour has it that the residents of small villages in Cornwall and the Hebrides used to rig fake navigation and lure ships onto the rocks, then plunder their cargos. I think this would be a terrific way to fund the completion of the studio, and for that matter, my forthcoming album. Lifeboat turns pirate ship! I love it.

It’s blowing a Force 8 gale outside, horizontal rain and bleak dark clouds whizzing by. Huge waves crashing on the beach. This is England in the Spring.

I was flattered to read that eccentric French film director Michel Gondry is making a compilation DVD of his work and wants to include my video for ‘Close But No Cigar.’ I’ve liked a couple of his movies but most of all I adore some of his work with my heroine, Bjork. The finest of the seven clips he did with her has to be ‘Isobel’, below. It’s a kick to read the comments about it on YouTube. People just don’t get her, do they? That’s because she’s from a different species altogether.

That Phoenix space probe that’s digging today under the surface of Mars with a robot arm drill, it might just send us back pictures of Bjork’s frozen face beneath the ice, lying there in her swan dress.



I have to confess there’s still a certain thrill when I watch something I’ve done climbing a chart. It’s not an experience I’ve had for some time. The very first time it ever happened to me I was ecstatic. I was 21. It was Lene Lovich’s ‘New Toy’ which I’d written and co-arranged, and played synths on. It got added to the BBC Radio 1 Playlist, which is an essential start, as in the 70′s and 80′s without it you couldn’t compete (unless you were the Sex Pistols or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but that’s another story.) After a couple of weeks it had risen high enough for us to get invited on Top Of The Pops, Britain’s one primetime music TV show, which again was essential if you wanted a hit. Without TOTP you had almost zero chance of reaching the Top 10; with it, you were likely to get there, even if your record was rubbish.

Even though the charts were only published weekly, when a song was going up them you could feel it. The phone was always ringing. A friend left you a message to say they heard it in their car. Your manager or someone from your record label called with a request for you to do an interview with Radio Aberystwyth. There would be a tiny mention on the Daily Mirror’s pop page. In the streets, you’d hear a titter from a group of kids as you walked by. Based on the accumulation of that buzz, as the day approached for the new chart to be announced, you would find yourself visualising and hoping for a certain number—#19, from last week’s #26? Then your manager would call and wake you early in the morning with the actual number, which would be a rush, or a shock.

When the record was struggling, you could feel that too. The phone would be eerily quiet. You feared the worst. And then when the chart position came in, and your record had stayed at #26, or worse, dropped to #29, you felt sad and deflated. You usually only get one shot at it. It’s almost impossible to turn a record around once it starts to fall. And this had a huge affect on your lifestyle. If the success continued, the offers would keep pouring in, each more exotic than the last: fly to Paris for a TV show, meet the NME’s top journalist who’s writing a feature, go to New York to play guest keyboards on some megaband’s new album. Your agent is desperate for you to tour in the Summer, playing bigger venues than ever before. But if the record went into freefall, within a week, people could be asking you when you’d start thinking about new material, a new album?

Thinking back, it was a crazy way to live. You couldn’t help it affecting your sense of self-worth, and the gratification you felt about your music, which was measured in radio playlists, chart positions, royalty statements. There was no way to truly get face to face with your audience. Signing autographs at the stage door certainly didn’t do it.

And the irony was, those charts were so manipulated. When you saw behind the scenes, the seamy underbelly of the pop business, you’d wish you hadn’t. Parties were thrown, peoples’ speedboats were berthed, their kids’ college funds received anonymous donations. You turned a blind eye to it, because you knew that in order to get heard by the public, and then to compete on a level with the other records that were out, you needed the dark machinery of the Music Business to be working in your favour, not against you.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that it’s all over! Those days are gone. Even if the mainstream music business is still ultimately more powerful than the MySpace world, it has changed beyond the point of no return. And I’m on the cusp. I have a reputation and core sales base that date back to my time on the charts; yet unlike some of my contemporaries, I have a good sense of how to take advantage of the new scheme of things. I feel lucky to have benefitted from the Music Biz when I did, even though there were other times when it did me no favours at all, and great songs got lost without trace just because the oily cogs never clicked into gear.

The main thing is, nowadays there’s not that disconnect between my sense of artistic self-worth, and the commercial realities of the charts and retail sales. Of course I do care whether people are taking notice, whether they’re listening to and buying my stuff, but it’s not a numbers racket any more. And I certainly don’t have to make any compromises just to make some A+R or marketing guy happy. I can live happily as a ‘cult’ artist, making great music and not caring too much about the charts—in fact, emulating my teenage musical heroes, few of whom ever got anywhere near Top Of The Pops.

Best of all, via the Internet, I get to read what real people truly think about my music. When it has affected someone in a profound way, I know I hit the mark. Each chord change or line of lyrics that I struggled with, deliberated over, and eventually settled on because it hit me in the gut—I hear back from somebody who felt it the same way I intended it. I communicated, I touched someone’s soul.

Regina Spector said it best:

“this is how it works
you peer inside yourself
you take the things you like
and try to love the things you took
and then you take that love you made
and stick it into some–
someone else’s heart
pumping someone else’s blood.”

(From ‘On The Radio.’)

I just found out an amusing fact about Radiohead. They met while attending Abindgon School in Oxfordshire. I was there too! I took my A-levels there (ok since you asked, I got a B in French, a C in English, and I went to the pub during the History exam). My family at that point lived about 3 miles outside Abindgon, as my father was an Oxford professor, but after being at boarding school in London for 3 years I was a real REBEL and demanded that I move to a local school where I could be a day boy. So I was at Abingdon from 1975 to 76, approximately, and left not long before my 17th birthday to go and get a job in a fruit and vegetable shop. Of course, I was Tom Robertson back in those days. Someone needs to list me as a famous alumnus in the Wikipedia entry about the school! Screw Radiohead being the only famous people to have gone there, along with Zippo the Clown and a rowing cox called Nicholas Bradie.

Oh and another curious thing, while I’m on the subject of famous shoolboys. At my previous school in London I was good friends with Shane MacGowan, of The Pogues. He and I used to sit together in the back row of English Lit. He was extremely smart. On one occasion during a boring reading of some classic novel or other, the teacher spotted me and Shane nattering. He singled me out saying something like ‘what figure of speech is “indubitably”…. Robertson?’ Shane whispered under his breath: ‘It’s an onanism.’ Ha. ‘IT’S AN ONANISM, SIR!’ I blurted out. Deadly pause. ‘Robertson, please come up to the front of the class, take down the Oxford English Dictionary and read out to the class the definition of the word onanism.’ Which I did. Much to the delight of Shane and the rest of the class.

Shane was the most knowledegable kid in school about rock music. A gang of us used to sit all afternoon in a cafe a few streets away from the school, drinking tea and smoking Woodbines, talking about progressive music like Yes, Genesis and Soft Machine. We also loved the Allman Bros who we considered raunchy and Steely Dan who were jazzy, experimental and rebellious. One day—this would have been around early 1975—Shane walks in to out cafe with a scowl on his face. ‘That’s all CRAP!’ he spits out from between his already rotten teeth. ‘The Beatles—bloody Pink Floyd—they’re just a bunch of old FUCKS!’

You could almost hear the collective gasp. How could our music guru possibly utter such sacrilege! We were shocked and upset. Well, who should we be listening to now then, we asked? Shane listed a bunch of bands we’d never heard of, though we’d sure enough rush off to Oxford St later to find them at the Virgin Records shop, where you could sit in an aircraft seat and listen to any album on headphones. ‘The New York Dolls. The MC5. Johnny Thunders. Wayne County. That’s the new stuff! Fuck the old fart bands!’

Of course, Shane’s proclamation was a barometer of the era we were about to live through. Rock music had indeed become staid and self-important. In the mid-1970′s merchant bankers were getting monthly subscriptions to Rolling Stone magazine. It was high time some new kid with a different hairdo, a new cut to his jeans, and a menacing snarl to his lip, came along and shook us all up. And that kid was Johnny Rotten, who appeared on the scene about a year later. The collective intake of breath could now be heard all over the nation. I can remember the review of a Marquee gig by the Sex Pistols in NME: ‘Who do they think they are? They played too loud and too fast while this Rotten bloke spat and sweared at the audience, kicked the monitor, and walked offstage half way through the set. Have young people today no respect for rock music?’

I only saw Shane once after we left school. I bumped into him on King’s Rd in about 1979. He was by then a famous figure in the London punk scene, and he was getting his photo taken standing next to some tourists. He was in bondage trousers and safety pins (I don’t remember what I wearing but in those pre-New Romantic days before the start of the 80′s it was probably a Demob WW2 suit and a fluffy shirt.) It was clear Shane and I had grown apart. He told me he was forming a band of his own. I was not surprised, though I had never suspected he had any singing talent. What kind of music was his band going to play, I asked? ‘Sorta punk folk,’ he said. I suppressed a giggle. That’ll never work, I thought! Wrong again.

Never underestimate Shane MacGowan. I should have learned my lesson with the Onanism thing.

If a $150/night hotel near Central Park in New York City sounds too good to be true….. it probably is!

I’m here for the ‘Sputnik Mania’ premiere at the IFC tonight. I jetted in for only two nights. Looked for a hotel on Expedia. Most hotels in the SoHo area start around $295/night. Last time I was here I found one on Expedia for about $160, close to Central Park, and it was a real score. That one (Park 76) had increased to $280 this time. So I picked another close by, the Belnord on 87th St, which is only $150 per night with free Internet. How for wrong could I go?

I was a little concerned when I walked into the lobby and it looked more like a taxi office. The clerk gave me the key to my room, on the 5th floor. He said he had to warn me there’s no elevator. Boy, I’m feeling glad all I have with me is a small rollaboard, unlike last time I came through NY on my way to TED with a keyboard flightcase packed full of equipment. And my torn calf ligament is close to completely healed. Still, I’ve carrying my laptop and a chunky hard drive as I’m hoping to get a couple more TED tunes mixed over the weekend. So I start climbing the 10 flights of stairs. The place looks like a building site—door framed half finished, dust everywhere, plastic sheeting. I get to the 5th floor, naively hoping that this one will be habitable; but it’s no different from the other floors. Now I realise to my horror that the clerk had pointed me down a different corridor, presumably with its own staircase! Standing there dreading the double trek back down, around and up again, I am approached by a Hispanic workman in overalls. I tell him my room number and he confirms my worst fears. But, ‘come!’ he says, and even picks up my case. I follow him through the rubble to a fire exit, and it opens onto a corridor on what presumably is the correct side of the building.

I find my room, and it’s a bare shell with a bed and a lamp. It’s hot in there, but the window doesn’t want to open, and I can tell that if I was to force it, the mini air conditioner would plummet 80 feet to its peril into the alleyway below. So I turn on the a/c but it’s one of those units that has a terrible, irregular rattle. And there’s no desk—so much for mixing this weekend! Nor, for that matter, is there a bathroom. Ugh. I call down to reception. It appears none of the available $150 rooms have bathrooms, you have to share one with everybody else on your floor. Oh well, at least my room is right opposite it.

But wait, it gets worse: the one shared bathroom has a problem with its lock. You have to slam the door repeatedly to get it closed enough so that you can lock it. So this means that every time anyone goes to the bathroom all night, I hear three minutes of repeated door slamming! This, combined with mild jetlag, assures me a rotten night.

But I’m up again at 6 and I head to a Starbucks around the corner (I know, I know) with my computer. I get some breakfast in me, and now things are looking up. I plug in my MacBook and my brand new MBox ProTools Micro. This is basically a little USB dongle that lets you use ProTools without being connected to any of their hefty hardware.

With occasional refills of capuccino I spent a very happy morning mixing a song of Rachelle Garniez’ called ‘Hello Cruel World’ on headphones. This needs to get done for potential inclusion on a BluRay disk of the TED Conference. It’s amazing what a good mix can do. I saw a QuickTime clip of us playing it at TED with the audio mix that was recorded live to camera. It was a long way from anything Rachelle would have been proud of. And I’m ashamed to say I seriously buggered up the second verse. I was playing a kind of saloon bar honky-tonk piano, and as I’m anything but fluent in that style I had a brain fart in the middle and played utterly the wrong notes. Ah, but that’s the beauty of multitrack recording: I simply cut and pasted 3 beats’ worth of my piano from the first verse into the second, and wa la. I checked it in sync with the QuickTime and it still works fine. Rachelle, incidentally, looks absolutely stunning. She’s one of those naturally videogenic people. And out of her mouth comes a growl like Tom Waits, it’s fantastic.

Now back at the hotel, all is all quiet and there’s just time for a nap before I head down to the Village for David’s premiere. He got a nice review in the New York Times today and he should be well pleased. He asked me to invite some of the ‘influential people’ that I know. I managed to knock off emails to David Byrne, Moby, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, but it remains to see if any of them will show up.

‘Sputnik Mania’ screens for the next 2 weeks at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village.

I’ll be flying to New York this weekend to join David Hoffman at the premiere of his feature-length documentary about the launch from the USSR 50 years of the first man-made satellite in space. If you’re around please come! It’s a terrific movie, and terribly relevant to today.

TED is over for another year. The band is dispersing. I’m still in California but I fly back to the UK tomorrow. We wrapped up the final morning with a Cajun French version of a famous Led Zeppelin song, featuring banjo, accordian, slapped electric cello, myself on tambourine, and Kaki King guesting on bottleneck guitar. Rachelle and I sang in Franglais. I wasn’t sure if the audience would get the joke, but they laughed in all the right places and we got some sincere applause at the end. For the final session we got Kaki, Vusi Mahlesela, Sxip Shirey and Nellie MacKay up onstage, and sang the WW2 classic ‘We’ll Meet Again’, complete with a knees-up and the lyrics up on a screen so the audience could sing along. I’m bummed because I bought a WW2 English army helmet on eBay specially for the occasion, but it only arrived at my hotel while we were onstage!

There were some fantastic speaker highlights, including Al Gore, author Amy Tan, and a spontaneous appearance by Robin Williams who filled in during a technical hitch. He had clearly been at TED incognito, as he was wearing a hat and specs; but when a BBC satellite broadcast went dead he could’nt resist the opportunity to chime in. He had the audience in stitches. I’ve known Robin for a few years and I’ve seen him do that on numerous occasions. He truly switches on like a light bulb.

One of the most unlikely but serendipitous hits of the conference for my band was in a session about the existence of Evil. I had planned to play an instrumental version of (another!) Special AKA tune, ‘Beirut’. But when TED curator Chris Anderson heard it he felt that, with its decidedly middle-Eastern flavour, it might come over as too judgemental, as if we were talking about the ‘Axis of Evil’ as defined by G W Bush. He said he wanted something more ‘concilliatory’. So I took that idea to my band–who of course said, “what the heck is ‘concilliatory’”? I said “oh, you know, something like ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’” I was only kidding! I threw that out there as an example. But in an instant they picked up their instruments and started playing this beautiful, floating version of the famous song. Rachelle did a drone on her accordian that sounded almost like bagpipes. Mark came in with a short stumpy wind instrument he calls a Xaphoon. Rufus was sawing away on his cello in a kind of psychedelic modal scale. The melody of the song kind of slowly emerged from the jam like an olive branch, with only the faintest of chord changes. The effect it had worked exactly as I’d hoped. The Evil session had left the audience with a very unpleasant, prickly feeling, and this piece was the perfect antidote.

Adam Theis and Rich Armstrong for the Jazz Mafia Horns drove down from San Francisco and joined us for a couple of tunes on Friday: a brilliant Louisiana-styled song of Rachelle’s called ‘Pre-Post Apocalypse’, and a rousing version by Mark Stewart of the Bonzos’ famous anatomical love song, ‘In The Canyons Of Your Mind’.

After four days of intense energy at TED this wonderful but awful hangover kicks in. You’re feeling this great upswelling of optimism and hope for the planet, and warmth from the incredibly discoveries and performances you’ve just been witness to, yet you’re emotionally drained.

Tomorrow I catch a plane back to England. I have to mix the audio of all the TED music for the DVDs and dowloadable TED talks. But after that my dance card is completely empty. I will have months of peace to write and record my own material–the first time I’ve been able to say that since about 1991! It’s a fine feeling.

I’m up on stage here at TED, and the show starts in a little under four hours. I’m surrounded by Hydrogen- and biodiesel-powered cars, tactile displays and dozons of plasma screens. Everything looks very beautiful this year. The main stage has been transformed into a private library thanks to Jay Walker who loaned us his fabulous collection of old books and oddities, including—wait for it—a real Sputnik! I’ve never seen one in the flesh before. He bought it on eBay. I wish I could take more pics but right now I am without any camera or cameraphone, as my Sidekick has refused to work in the US after seven months away. I’m going to nip out in a minute and pick up a cheap one with Bluetooth, then I’ll be able to add some more pics.

Mark and Rufus had a horrible flight out—two plane changes, each time being told they would probably miss their connection and they certainly couldn’t bring those big instrument cases on board. Rufus is coming down with a cold, and by the time we finally got to soundcheck at about 8 last night he was wiped out. But we struggled through a few tunes, and it’s great to be on a nice stage with decent foldback and lighting, after rehearsing these songs in Rufus’ attic! Everyone is feeling confident and though 11 pieces is a lot of info to keep in your head, we do have the luxury of a dressing room with a practice amp where we can run each piece before we play it.

Bumped into Mike Rubin in the lobby, my friend who just had the stroke. Glad to say he looks remarkably well and is only numb down one side of his body. I have yet to see David Hoffman, but I understand he’s going to give a 3-minute talk about the fire that destroyed his studio. He’s making a documentary film about it! Typical. The man is unstoppable. As for me my leg is feeling a lot better and I’m trying to walk without a limp, as instructed by my physio.

This is quite surreal—as I’m writing, Peter (from Peter, Paul and Mary) is in the very next room, singing ‘Puff The Magic Dragon.’ For real!

How did this come about? Rufus, my host, has a musical duo with Peter’s daughter, and he came by Rufus’ studio today to add some last minute touches to a new kid’s CD he is making, which involves re-recording some of his old hits.

Of course this song, as Ben Stiller’s character in ‘Meet The Parents’ would be quick to point out, is not really about a magic dragon.

The TED band is sounding pretty good. Mark Stewart was unable to rehearse with us today as he has a gig at Carnegie Hall with Bobby McFerrin. (Now HE’d be a cool guy to get to TED.) We were working out a Cajun version of a very famous Led Zeppelin song. This old Brooklyn brownstone was rocking today!