The View from the Spaghetti Factory

Yes, in a poor attempt to hide the fact that I haven’t written any new music since 1974, I have once more plunged into the back catalogue in search of another “yes, very nice, but…” tune.

The latest victim is a solo acoustic guitar piece called “Winter Thames Sunset”, inspired by… well, have a guess! The first version (from about four years ago) was for a Guitarist Collective task, so I probably made it in a hurry. Whatever, I just wasn’t satisfied with the sound of my guitar, which admittedly doesn’t really lend itself to this sort of sensitive fingerpicking, being better suited to chunky strumming or single-note lead playing.

Refusing to give in, I experimented with microphone positioning and EQ and recorded a better version. It’s still a long way from what I want, but it’s a lot better. You can listen to it with a feeling of community spirit on my Myspace, or in better quality mp3 form here…

Winter Thames Sunset

I’ve been re-evaluating some old recordings recently. I find that some of the tunes I’ve made for the Guitarist Collective can sound a bit uncomfortably contrived; not surprisingly, as they were all made to fit the monthly challenges. I quite like several of the basic concepts, though, so I’ve been looking into ways of making them sound a bit more “composed”.

The latest one is “The Man Who Said No”. In its original Collective form, it used to be “Traffic Island”, but I never really liked the ugly, soaring rawk lead guitar in the middle. I’ve added some new parts, tweaked some others, and remixed the whole thing.

My music site is down (itself waiting for reinvention!) at the moment, but you can hear “The Man Who Said No” on my Myspace page. There’s a couple more old tunes I want to rework or re-record, and then I might just manage to create something NEW… ;-)

If, like me, you use the train as your main form of transport, especially for cross-country journeys, you probably book your tickets from The Trainline, right? You get that clear interface, showing the prices of all available tickets, easy credit card payments, a choice of delivery methods… awww, let’s all have a lovely cosy Trainline appreciation party RIGHT HERE!

One further question. Do you live in the east of Britain, where the main intercity train operator is GNER? Well, here’s a tip… don’t use The Trainline to book your tickets.

Trying to book tickets to Lincoln, I was annoyed at how The Trainline specified a particular service via Retford, even though I knew there were much faster connections via Newark. I think they must have a fixed allocation of tickets for each service; whatever, I’ve craftily sidestepped this problem in the past by buying direct from the train operator’s website.

On this occasion, I wasn’t able to get the exact ticket I wanted direct from GNER, but something else grabbed my attention… GNER have a range of tickets with an online discount, which you can’t get through The Trainline. For example…

Standard Advance 3
Trainline — £17
GNER — £15.15

1st Advance 1
Trainline — £21.90
GNER — £19.50

For tickets in both directions, for more than one person, that’s quite a difference.

There. You can’t say I don’t do important consumer research for you.

Any Tom Waits fans reading this? Browsing in Waterstones the other day, I noticed this new biography…

The Many Lives of Tom Waits

A book of collected interviews has been around for a while, but even the thought of reading several interviews in succession bores me to tears. However, this new book immediately attracted my attention, not least because it’s by Patrick Humphries, whose biography of Nick Drake impressed me a couple of years back.

It’s still in hardback at the moment, so I shall be waiting for a while (too expensive, too much shelf space, too bulky for train journeys). One for the “books to read” list, though…