i hid my yo yo in the garden

for sarah. i'd forgotten how dreadful the cloudbusting video was. it's bonkers, but not in a good way. as appealing as kate is, i'd always prefer to listen to the music without watching her looking startled in a leotard or poncing around in a tutu and tights. or even pretending to be a 12 year old boy with donald sutherland. i have somewhere a dvd of kate's bbc special back in nineteen-grandad. here's a taste of the horrors on offer.

so, best without the visuals then (even her albun covers were generally terrible). but hounds of love would have to be in my top 5 ever. the dreaming could probably be there too, come to think of it. the few times my mum complained about 'that awful noise coming from your room' i was invariably playing the dreaming very loud. it's a genuinely strange record. you wonder what happened to kate between never for ever and that one.

the unthanks

a beautiful gig at the komedia the other night from everyone's favourite tyneside tragi-folk tentet. nigel and i counted twelve deaths and a miscarriage (not in the audience, in the lyrics). great sound, great music. and as lucy remarked, unspoilt by people taking videos or generally being arses. nigel reported the bar staff were rather taken aback by the amount of real ale they were selling ('can't normally shift the stuff' etc) till they were told it was a folk gig.

information rain

conor and i have been starting to set about compiling material for a sonnamble release (in time for the all important christmas market with any luck). the amount of material we've generated amounts to over 200 gigabytes. this would probably have accounted for all of NASA's digital storage not too long ago. accumulated over about a year, these are live recordings of me playing double bass, electric bass, lap steel guitar, and even ye olde novation bafftation, live processed by conor, who occasionally slips in a bit of lap steel or electric guitar. one with a leopard skin scratchplate. oh yes.

we could of course do a 50 cd box set and release the lot, but the only reason for that would be to guarantee a 70 word review in the wire. so hence the sifting and sorting process. conor has already spent a silly amount of hours assembling some pieces which work, so we're some way there already. i'm starting to sift through some sessions myself, and it'll be interesting to see what conor makes of my selections. this is the point where i suppose we start to agree what works and what doesn't. that is all ludicrously subjective of course but i reckon we'll get there...