The Mekano Set

Hello rock fans.

Miss Garfield has just informed me that we are playing Brighton's near-legendary sleaze-rawk venue The Engine Rooms on 15th September. More details soon.

We still have a lot of new tracks to do final mixes of but I've been lacking in energy lately and we've been concentrating more on gigs and getting CD's out to peoples.

Hello and big big big thanks to the people who've actually ASKED us for CD's recently - as opposed to the people who don't put up a fight when we GIVE them CD's. As soon as we agree on what the track-listing will be we'll get them out to you.

I sort of had a day off today. Instead of my usual day, trying to stay awake, sitting at my make-shift desks with a look of despair on my face illuminated by a number of dodgy computer screens and fairy lights yelling things like "please stay in tune" and "god what have I done", I sat in the park with Dr. jO, ate chicken salad, laughed and larked.

Dr. jO is a real-life Doctor. Not a 'Doctors and Nurses / Ooooh Matron Nooo' Doctor {that's more Steve's territory} but a Doctor of Musicology.

She cannot {legally} examine you but she can probably examine your music and tell you how to make it more like something that belongs in the Paris salon of a cool 1920's lesbian who writes novels and has Gertrude Stein and G.I. Gurdjieff round for tea and turkish delight on sundays, or the cellar-bar where they all hang out on saturdays and drink blue drinks and wear pretend moustaches and whalebone corsets.

She once 'conducted' Al as he played violin, with a saw, and a typewriter. I still have the remains somewhere.

Their influence on us is obvious I'm sure you'll agree.

More recently jO has turned her attention to playing cello, with a microphone, and recording the results via a megaphone. She is decades ahead of me in terms of the intellectual ins-and-outs of creativity, art and musicology, and in the physical 'make art until it almost kills you' stakes. She's doing a performance or two soon.

Al has started gigging again too. He too is years ahead of me and I am increasingly in awe of his ability to write proper songs that pluck away at heart strings, let alone his effortlessly husky singing voice. He always makes me think of Marc Bolan for some reason. Mind you, I also say that about Devendra Bernhardt so what do I know? But I'll bet he's a fan of both though...

So anyway, it's not all 'rawk and roll with a drum machine' in our world.

Missing pieces.

Anyhoo, people to be... places to do...