Old (in) New York

60 years ago today - the fifth of my annual birthday portraits in front of the family radiogram.

This morning you find your roving reporter at the front end of a 10 day stay with my cousin and her family in New York. Interestingly, a couple of things will have changed forever by the time I return to Old Blighty next week. 1) All future visits to my barber on a Monday or Tuesday will be £5 cheaper than previously, and, of even greater significance, 2) My local pub will apparently give me a 10% discount every Thursday. The reason? Today I turn  65....sixty bloody five! Like the t-shirt says, it's weird being the same age as old people, but at least those are two somewhat positive points of my extreme dotage.

I'm obviously writing this ahead of time, but my cousin has already let it slip that they've made plans for my, ahem, big day, even though I will only just have flown into the country and will therefore probably be a complete mess. I can barely make it past 8pm when I'm on home turf these days, so attempting to stay awake, alert and coherent late into the evening of my first day in a different time zone is going to be something of a challenge, to say the least. In a restaurant on the first evening of a New York trip about 20 years ago, after being awake for 24 hours, I momentarily forgot to open my eyes again when blinking and very nearly ended up face first in my meal. I'll let you know how I get on this time round.

Our old pal Brian pointed me in the direction of Community Radio's 'Look Now You're Cursed' nine long years ago and I still spin it regularly. This one seemed appropriate today.

Community Radio - Old New York

Monday Long Song

Have I really never posted this before? It's hard to believe quite frankly. 'Are We a Warrior', the title track of Ijahman Levi's 1979 LP, sits comfortably among my favourite reggae tunes of all time. It lilts, swings and sways, delivering a plea for universal peace in the most soulful way. Let not your arrow from your bow.

Ijahman Levi - Are We a Warrior

Friday Photo #68

A 1930 photo of Joyce in the arms of her maternal grandmother, Anorah.

My Aunt Joyce's life, which began over 95 years ago in an East London terraced house, ended last Sunday evening in a small white room in a Norwich hospital, with my cousin and I by her side. Following a couple of years of steadily declining health, her passing from this world was peaceful.

My cousin has spent much of the last 18 months criss-crossing the Atlantic to care for her mum, while I made regular, though somewhat shorter journeys up and down the M11 to support them both. Latterly my aunt was relocated to a lovely residential care home, just across the Norfolk/Suffolk border, about a mile from my front door. It was by far the longest period she'd spent outside London in her entire life and, unsurprisingly, she didn't care for it much, but it was close enough that I could drop in to see her and report back to my cousin on a regular basis.  

For the first 15 years of my life Joyce, my uncle and my cousin lived upstairs in the same house as us. As a consequence, my cousin and I regard each other as siblings and grew up feeling that we'd each been blessed with an extra set of parents. 

Joyce leaves her daughter, son-in-law and three remarkable grandchildren.

Johnson Mkhalali - Joyce No.2

I Think Therefore I Ain't

Last week came the shocking news that David Johansen has been privately battling stage 4 cancer for a decade and a brain tumour for the past five years. He's been forced to go public with his condition since breaking his back in two places following a fall in November, leaving him bedridden and incapacitated. His daughter has created a site to raise funds for full-time nursing, physical therapy and day-to-day living expenses. The immediate outpouring of love and good wishes from all corners of social media has been heart-warming to see and is a testament to the high esteem Johansen is held in throughout the music world.

I have enough miles on the clock to have seen the legendary Old Grey Whistle Test performance by The New York Dolls in 1973 when it originally aired. I was 13 years old at the time and it scared and excited me in equal measure. I followed Johansen into his post-Dolls career, particularly his first three solo albums. The second of those, 1979's 'In Style', is my favourite. It's a Mick Ronson co-production, an unashamedly commercial record, a little of its time perhaps, but chock-full of big hooks and catchy choruses. Sending you all my best David.

David Johansen - She

David Johansen - Justine

Monday Long Song

Soft Machine founding member, keyboard player Mike Ratledge passed away last Wednesday at the age of 81. Although he left the band as long ago as 1976, his contributions to their first eight studio albums and countless subsequently released live sets are immense and the stuff of legend. Here's the short lived 1969 version of Soft Machine consisting of Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, Brian Hopper and Robert Wyatt, performing on John Peel's Top Gear. Within months Brian Hopper was out, to be replaced by Elton Dean, thus completing what many consider to be the classic line-up of the band.

Soft Machine - Facelift / Mousetrap / Noisette / Backwards / Mousetrap Reprise

Monday Long Song

My abject despair, towards the end of 2024, at being informed that 'Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck', the debut LP by Flotation Toy Warning, had just turned 20 years old (20 bloody years!) was almost immediately quelled with news of an imminent anniversary reissue. Despite this exotic collection of melancholic, far-out pop songs being one of my favourite albums of.....well....., the past two decades apparently, I'd never actually owned a physical copy. For ten years or so it was only available on CD and the initial vinyl pressing in 2015 sold out in the blink of an eye. This time round a mere 500 copies were up for grabs and there was no way I was going to miss out again. If 'Donald Pleasance' tickles your fancy, head over to Flotation Toy Warning's Bandcamp page (here) to check out the rest of the album, particularly the frankly magnificent 'Popstar Researching Oblivion', which, at a smidgen over 6 minutes is sadly a little too short to qualify for this feature. Rules are rules.

The band's splendid follow up, 'The Machine That Made Us', arrived 13 years after their debut and the wait for album number three is now into its 8th year. Come on lads.

Flotation Toy Warning - Donald Pleasance

All Our Years Become a Tale That is Told

In May 1994 I flew to New York for the third time to stay with my cousin and her husband. In later years whenever a trip to the Big Apple was looming, I'd pre-book tickets for gigs or other events of interest online, but in those pre-internet days she would mail me a copy of The Village Voice listings guide a couple of weeks before I travelled, then order any tickets I required and I would settle up with her when I arrived. It was all very analogue back then, but that was how I found out about an concert entitled 'In Their Own Words - A Bunch of Songwriters Sittin' Around Singin''. It was one of a series of similar events at The Bottom Line, a small venue on West 4th Street, taking place bang in the middle of my stay and a show I definitely didn't want to miss. For $18 I got to spend a couple of hours in the company of Ted Hawkins, Roger McGuinn, Pete Seeger and Joe South as they sat in a semi-circle on the stage talking about their lives and playing music acoustically, together and individually, in a very informal setting. 

I'd seen Ted Hawkins live in Norwich in 1986, on his first wave of success following radio exposure from Andy Kershaw, but he'd fallen off the radar again quite soon after. By 1994, however, he'd been re-discovered and chatted enthusiastically on stage about his new album on the major label, Geffen, and played us a few songs from it. Tragically, Ted's life was to end seven months later as the result of a stroke, aged just 58. 

In spite of Hawkins' considerable contribution to the evening, the majority of the New York audience were there for McGuinn, Seeger and South, all of whom played their best known material interspersed with anecdotes and memories. Inevitably, given the location and the parties involved, Bob Dylan loomed large in several of the conversations. Roger recounted the 'give this to McGuinn' story regarding the opening line to 'Ballad of Easy Rider', Pete Seeger gave his version of the mythical axe incident from the day Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and, perhaps most fascinating of all, Joe South spoke a little about the Nashville 'Blonde on Blonde' recording sessions in 1966. It was an unforgettable evening. 

We lost Joe South in September 2012, by coincidence the same month that Pete Seeger, at the age of 93, released what he claimed was the first album of all original music he'd ever recorded. 'A More Perfect Union' was written and performed in conjunction with Seeger's long-time friend Lorre Wyatt. Guests on the album included Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris. Though I have immense respect for his achievements, I can't claim to be a scholar of Pete's music, but 'Fields of Harmony', sung by Seeger alone, is a remarkable performance. The vocal, by this stage little more than an abrasive whisper, is extremely moving. 

Pete Seeger passed away 11 years ago today.

 'When my days have been consumed, like smoke

 I will lay me down to sleep, in peace 

Over fields of harmony, I'll fly.' 

Pete Seeger - Fields of Harmony