CosmiKnot

  Into the valley by The Skids   Driving past the village pond Perhaps we would have brought you here Though that chapter has ended The one that began with me crouched  In front of the B&W portable tv In your and mum’s bedroom Taping Into the Valley of the Dolls by Generation X Onto my very own radio-cassette The one with a five-pin din for recording LPs The end of an era  Was it on vinyl? Ready steady go - you’re not ready to go you tell us You would like a nice cold beer You want to look at a smiling face I can’t make any more analogies anymore To explain the hard-plastic oxygen mask  Clamped to your face Twisting it out of shape Nippy the friendly CO2 level monitor Bleeping and warning us as you struggle  To be understood through the membrane. The priest with his yellowing well  Thumbed liturgical guidebook Thrown in out of his depth A sage fisherman’s sweater clinging to his paunch Falling with us down the log plume I see your face as we are su...

You are in a semi-trendy coffee shop come bar on Long Acre, WC2, on a fine day in May at some point during the turn of the century. You do that half getting up thing to shake the hand of the man who has just joined your company. He is boyishly handsome with a certain rugged traveller’s masculine quality. He reminds you of your best friend at school who had the same easy self-confidence, arising from good-looks and physical presence. This is Michael says Kevin the man who has invited you here today. Earlier Kevin told you that you would be joined by the son of Ronnie Biggs and so when you shake hands there is a mutual acknowledgement in the brief locking of eyes, that you are meeting the son of someone connected. Quite why the son of a great train robber is at your meeting is not something you can answer easily but somehow fits in with the felt intensity of being on the brink of something. It’s a feeling you often experienced during your time with Humbug Records. Humbug were a tiny labe...

 This is an article I wrote about writing songs about eleven years ago for a Magazine edited by Jonny Other: Using Passions As Beacons Leads to Instances of Backwards Causality  or How Not to Write a Pop Song and stay looking trendy            “You must always know what your song is about before commencing” this was the best advise I could get online when trying to work out how I write songs. never the less I remain convinced that there are certain persons who are able, almost without effort, to relax the muscles of the mind and slip from the shackles of habitual thought and let their ideas soar way beyond the seven feet of biosphere we habitually patrol.  I suppose despite my fear of giving away the end I should consider the idea that backwards causality is simply a manifestation of the ability of the subconscious mind to function more rapidly and dynamically than the rational mind- thus giving the everyday brain the...

A song created for Blakefest 2020 by David Devant and his Spirit Wife. Inspired directly by William Blake's vision of Albion:  Grass - green screen- green screen grass - analogue - virtual - virtual - actual - green green screen - grass - lawn - earth - pixel take everything and make it matter for expression and the virtual weaves with the actual in fiery visions. There’s something magical about grass as a green screen when one considers how William Blake found the virtual in the material. released for Blake's birthday on Corporate records

The power of a new facial expression SO this week sees the latest change of image from the nations beloved chameleon of pop. What do you make of this new incarnation? Well the shape shifting genius has done it again haven’t they? I mean would you have thought this was remotely possible? I don’t know would you? Is it the trousers or the extra layer of eye shadow that has facilitated this rug-pulling event?   I think is essentially something more superficial than that. Or perhaps a combination of the two.   The sleeveless jump suit could also have a major influence in the way the public perceive this tectonic shift though. But it’s not a new thing is it? I mean after all many musician have played with their image and the idea of celebrity haven’t they? Haven't they? Yes that’s true. Take Tony Hadley for instance he started off wearing tartan blankets and then morphed into a kind of city man suit-wearing persona. Or even someone like Toyah who entranced...

A lovely video made on exactly no pence by Simon Love for my song

You are in the living room of the high ceilinged Edwardian ground floor conversion flat belonging to your girl friend. You are kneeling on the smooth paisley fabric of the luxurious three-seater sofa. This is a sophisticated room, the style of which you had no hand in forming. You are essentially an archetypal musician who moved in with his bread-winning girlfriend. The black plastic hi-fi stack of record player cassette player and radio is tuned to BBC Radio 2. You have been told by your plugger to tune in and are now illegally recording the Simon Mayo show. His producer is talking, telling the disc jockey that he has found the most amazing song, which will surely be Christmas number one this year. Simon Mayo is not convinced and in a sneery voice announces that he finds the song to be similar to “Life is Life” (actually the title of the Laibach cover of “Live is Life”. You inwardly squirm at the absurdity of making a comparison based on the fact that both the Opus song and your own ...

Looking back over the sea of fog I can now report that my Mr. Solo odyssey was an attempt to live life as cheese dream. To go hither and thither wherest it may lead me. Lately I've been in search of a good sleep. I think this began when the ultimate cheese dream manifested after a Mr. Solo rehearsal. Now I can see how this may have been to do with my karmic directors being at odds with the flow of the universe. This resulted in a transit van carrying two tons of gold hitting me head on. I thank G(g)od (the universe) that I was alone but still feel that terrifying fear of being buried alive that I felt at the time from time to time. It's wearing off a little and I find I can once more see the magical side of sitting at a set of traffic lights in a neck brace trying not to rubber neck the doubloons on the road.  And so it was that I took a train journey to Royal Tunbridge Wells in search of a certain fermented dairy product style somnambulistic experience. It was a time to rea...

     For the past two weekends I have been trying to resolve the sale of my wife’s and mine long playing records. This is a compact way of describing the process that has been slowly unravelling since we met and so that is the plot I shall try and detail. As I type my wife has just congratulated me on “sorting the records out”. That’s more money than I thought she declares gaily dismissing three quarters of my life’s memories. Stick to the plot. Last Saturday I packed the four crates into the car and ordered the boys into the car for the drive a mile down the road. This took longer than a non-parent record collection indulging individual would anticipate and consequently we were fractionally too late for the loading bay outside the shop. After two circuits the space had become available when the Astra van pulled off. The boys and I spotted no cameras pointed at the bay and decided to take a chance. The moment we got in the space a large whale of a bus surfaced a...