Travelling Again
I’ve been in Athens for a while. A good friend was celebrating a ‘big’ birthday and had to be there for a conference, so a bunch of us descended on him and took him out to tavernas and to see the wonderful sights.
It’s always amazing there, and reminds me very much of my father, but in a good way. He used to take me around the ruins and the museums, and tell me amazing stories that were not in any guide book. I feel ashamed that I can’t now remember many of them, to replay them to my friends. It’s a little sad that back in those days one could walk more or less anywhere among the ruins, whereas now there is so much construction and restoration going on and you’re very limited.
I think I have finally shaken off the post-tour blues. These last couple of legs really took it out of me, what with airport security issues, computers breaking down, work permit shenanigans and so on. I really love touring but when things go awry and you have to pull out all the stops so that the show can go on, it’s very draining. Especially at my advanced age! I have played over 75 shows in the last couple of years, and for the most part it’s been fantastic. The audiences have been so welcoming, and have made me feel right at home. My band and crews have been great. But I feel I’m done with touring for a while now, and it’s time to move onto the next phase.
Now I can relax and get on with some new music. It’s good to be back in England, actually seeing the seasons change. I have spent only short periods here since I left in 1986, and I’ve always enjoyed visiting, but there’s a certain continuity that I’ve missed out on; here it’s more about the quality of life than the standard of living, and now my family will get to experience that as well, going to English schools, being around their relatives, making new friends.
We had some drama a couple of weeks ago when the whole East Coast of Britain was hit by a huge gale and many small villages like ours were flooded. The tide was about 9 ft higher than it was supposed to be, seeping up through the beach, and all around our house lagoons of seawater were forming. There’s a small bridge you have to cross to get to our house, and the water was over the road so we were effectively an island for a few hours. The kids of course thought this was very exciting, but beautiful as it was, Kathleen and I found it a bit disconcerting. The flood was not strictly speaking a result of global warming, though the incidence of high tides like this may be on the increase. However, there were many villages in East Anglia that disappeared under the waves over the centuries, and ours could soon become one of them.
So I’ve been on the lookout for a lifeboat. Preferably a classic wooden one with lots of character. I plan to put it on blocks in my garden, like an Ark. It will make a fantastic studio; and if one day we all have to clamber aboard and float off across the ocean, I’ll just keep right on making music.
Its great to have you back blogging again Thomas. I’m sitting in my loft (having moved in from the shed a couple of months ago) bashing out the piano part for the chorus of Urges! I bet that takes you back, though probably not as far back as your trip to Athens. I recently took a trip back to East Anglia; to a little (actually not so little any more) village called Wivenhoe where I grew up with my mother and her parents. That part of the world holds some very special memories for me and its amazing how revisiting that once familiar landscape moved me.
The tone of your blog sounded pretty positive, so I imagine it was either written before the England game tonight, or perhaps you just couldn’t bear to watch it? I seem to remember someone saying Beckham was a spent force….?
Cheers,
Andrew
He’s alive!!!!
I was beginning to wonder!
You sound refreshed. That’s great to hear.
“…if one day we all have to clamber aboard and float off across the ocean, I’ll just keep right on making music.”
Cheers,
Jon
Thomas,
Good to see your blogging again.
I know what you mean when you cant quite recall stories once told by someone close.
I have some recollections of grandfathers antics in the RAF in WWII.
Its nice to get some R&R when its a nice warm pub, on winters day open fire, pint of Adnams say at the Ship inn Dunwich. (great museum next door about Dunwich)
I was quite concerned when the surge hit, as you mentioned that the water just bubbles up through the shingle. (now you have seen your garden flood)
The sea came over the road at the bottom of my lane.
But Felixstowe Ferry was quite a site.
here are some good pictures video from Felixstowe TV
http://www.felixstowetv.co.uk/e107_plugins/eplayer/eplayer.php?view.456.0.20
I have a good friend she is in the process of writing a book about east anglia in 200 years time called the ‘Anglian Archipelago’
shes just won a arts council grant to complete it.
should be an interesting read.
Best
Lindon
Really nice to see you out here blogging again, Thomas. =) That first photo has such a wonderfully moody sky, it looks unreal!
Relax, make music, enjoy life. And blog more often!
Great to see your back thomas,
And when your ready to start making new music’ we are all ready to listern…
I just took a look at the blog comments and after reading Merujo’s and realised that I was missing something. I opened the blog again using Firefox and it is correctly formatted there. IE (surprise, surprise!) doesn’t work very well at all. The images are the wrong size and the first one doesn’t show at all for me. Thanks Microsoft!
Anyway… the pics from Athens reminded me of the US Capitol 7″ picture sleeve of Europa and the pirate twins so I opened up the cupboard and had a look at it. I even played it! Spinning a vinyl record is such a novelty these days.
I don’t recognise the steps where that sleeve photograph was taken but it’s a similar style and quite something to still be performing the same song after such a long time and testament to the quality that it still evokes the same reactions after a quarter of a century!!! Well played that man! (pun intended)
What a recording that was too. Justin Hildreth on drums, Andy Partridge on harmonica, Mark Heyward-Chaplin on bass, Kevin Armstrong on Guitar and Les Chappel backing up.
That really was The Golden Age of Wireless. This track was the only one on that album recorded at Ad Vision in 1981 and I have always wondered why this is the only track credited to that session. Was it a one-off for the single or did it predate the Tapestry session in September and October 1981?
What I wouldn’t give to hear you, Justin, Kevin and Mark play Commercial Breakup live. It would be so great to hear you rework that song too. It is one of my all-time favorites and I know that I am in very good and numerous company on that point.
As you can see my mind is wondering again! I wish I could get a job that could keep me so interested in the detail!
Cheers,
Jon
Hmm, as I recall that stadium in the US Europa cover was in Madrid, and needless to say it was a ‘repro’ neo-Greek affair. Andrew Douglas shot it while on a brief tour of Spain in 1980 with my one-man show. I still get a chuckle when I see what appears to be a Bluetooth headset!
Europa was indeed recorded as a one-off at Advision. In those days before record deals, studio time was very scarce for me, costing hundreds of £’s an hour which I did not usually have. But I’d just gotten back from recording Foreigner 4 in New York, and I had a pocket full of cash, so I treated myself to a couple of days in Advision and recorded Europa in about 20 hours. It was the first time I’d worked with Justin and Mark as a rhythm section on my own stuff. Ditto Kevin Armstrong on guitar, whom I’d played with on his own recordings under the name Local Heroes (Matthew Seligman was the bass player hence the intro to Kevin.) Andy Partridge of XTC was again kind enough to help out on harmonica. One day I will do a Family Tree of all these connections!
Thomas, Great to have you ‘on the blog’ again. After your gig in Islington I have checked the site pretty much every day waiting for news. Sounds like you had a tough tour but rest assured the gigs were very well received. Looking forward to some new material.
Glad to hear from you again Thomas. Your story about the raising water in a small village in “Angleterre” , reminded me of one of my all time favorite Science-Fiction novels “The Kraken Wakes” by the great English master of disaster, John Wyndham. (Surely you remember his “Day of the Triffids”! ) That book was my first introduction to the idea of global warming when I read it as a kid. However, instead of man’s doing GW is caused by some rather not so nice unseen aliens who decide to melt the polar ice caps! Naturally nearly all of the UK sinks beneath the waves. Damn fine reading IMO. It will definitely make you want to build that boat you speak of!
)
Kenmode, my lack of blogging was not in any way a reflection of my response to the UK audiences and vice versa. That aspect of the tour was just great, and the Islington gig, with some of my old friends up there onstage with me, was certainly the highlight. I just felt very drained at the end given the trials we went through, and not in a mood to whitewash it and try to put a brave face on for the blog!
Your “advanced age”–ha ha, Thomas!
I know–one can’t always put on a brave face, especially if one
is emotionally exhausted [that's my term for when one has simply
had enough, and just need a break for a while]. Sometimes
one’s batteries need a lonnnnnnnng time to recharge…and
Greece sounds like a wonderful place to recharge them in, even
with all of the preservation/restoration work going on.
All of us can only do the best we can, and try not to be too hard
on ourselves. Life gets bl**dy hard when our best isn’t good
enough, though. Takes chunks out of the ol’ self-esteem, at
least it does for me…
I fight with my computer a lot, too–it was yer basic paperweight
I’m not gonna fix it.
until yesterday, when I finally girded my loins and tackled it.
I reinstalled the operating system yesterday, then all of the vital
programs tonight–in 45 minutes! That was 7 different programs,
drivers and one patch. And many, many restarts, just to make
sure everything got integrated properly. My brian is fried. Ha, I
just misspelled ‘brain’, and I don’t care!
My spelling, I mean. As for my computer, perhaps I should
just shoot it. Kidding!
Ooooh, I’m sure being reckless now…!!! I wish I could restart
Oh, wait, I can: it’s called getting some sleep. So I’ll
*myself*
just go and do that. Gad, I’m an awful night owl!
Looking forward to some new music, “when it’s done!” of course!
Quality takes time.
Peace and my strange ability to create comedy out of thin air,
Kara, female geek and proud of it!
Years ago, in the middle of the North American landmass, some friends and I frequently played tennis through the hot, humid summer night until the very last flickering of the metal halide lamps. Generally, we were accompanied by a cheap boombox. Our drug of choice? The Golden Age of Wireless on cassette (still have it). Thus, over the past couple of years, it has been a great pleasure to behold a fave artist transitioning online from Kinda Dormant Site W/Dusty Michael Jackson Anecdotes to Live Entity to Touring Entity to Recording Entity!
Managing to catch a couple of SoCal shows (Cerritos was delightfully weird — almost like a prim preview of a play about “Thomas Dolby”) and to read about the rest and all attendant life-detail really summoned a big smile.
Haven’t checked in for a good while, but very happy to see these latest reports. Prolly be over there at holidaytime. If a one-off suddenly materialises, do say!
And thank you for the shirt. ‘Tis a token, but a nice one. At some point, I hope to give it to somebody, and I hope their face looks like this:
/O O\
v
O
Oh, and without meaning to sound persnickety at all — before there were Macs (and careless people to break them), how did you do all that amazing stuff that went into Live Wireless? (I saw Peter Gabriel in the mid-80s and the early-naughts as well, and he didn’t seem to have a problem wowing everybody live while the Mac Plus was in its infancy.) Just curious…
Well Wishes to You and Yours!
Many Happy Returns!
(Oh, and a friend in Europe just sent me a live Marvin Gaye CD. Thought of you.)
P.S. It moved the “nose” and “mouth”! Software crash! Reboot!
Hey Thomas, nice to have you back. I must say I agree with you about the ruins, not having been there myself, but I do hate it when things get spoilt because the word “money” is involved somewhere, such as the Canarian tourist industry, and how it pollutes the way most people think about the canary islands. More often than not I find that having enough money is great, having big money tends to spoil people (though thankfully, it’s had the opposite effect on you!).
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could tell me whether or not there is any live material from the UK leg of the tour, that I’m sure would go down a treat, they were some fantastic gigs.
The Athenian ruins and others like them around the world are truly treasures and opportunities to step back in time, in a sense. While the illusion is broken a bit by the degree of tourism built up around them, there is a necessity for that industry or the host countries to maintain and protect those sites so that generations to come can learn from them as we are today.
Glad you’re getting some time to travel without touring on the brain. Hopefully these historically rich areas will bring some fresh ideas for your next muical endeavours!
Thomas,
Welcome back.
I’m thinking a shot of that lifeboat in your garden might make a good album cover, or liner note fodder.
My wife and I went to Italy for our honeymoon a few or 7 years ago. Many of the old structures we visited were the same way as you describe: covered with scaffolds and under construction. Hopefully they will finish whatever restoration they are doing all over Europe so people can see it that way again.
Cheers.
Jon beat me to the Europa record parallel!
…eh, well, I discovered this recent blog series kinda late.
Happy traveling, Thomas!
You’re right about the stories your father told. Growing up, my mom would feel the need to share all the old stories with us…of family, history, or books she’d read.
Yeah, yeah….you’ve told us that 1000 times….or we’d just tune her out. Smartest person in the world, I was. In my arrogance, I closed my “All Knowing” mind to some pretty good insights.
Now, trying to recall the ongoing narrative when I’m receptive to it is pretty much impossible….it’s lost for the most part.
I guess I’m not the only one!
Ed White