AW62

AW62 was last weekend, a proper gathering of the clans at The Golden Lion in Todmorden, an 18th century stone walled pub nestled into a gap between a hill and the canal, to celebrate the life of Andrew Weatherall on what would have been his 62nd birthday. Andrew's brother Ian, one of the event's key movers, said that it was planned as a party that had 'everything except Andrew'. The line up of DJs and acts was testament to the spirit of the man, a diverse and exceptional bunch of DJs, writers, artists, producers, publishers and bands. 

Some highlights from a weekend packed full of them- this is necessarily a highly selective account drawn from my at times unreliable memories. Everyone who attended will have their own version and highlights but these were some of mine. 

Friday night saw Richard Fearless DJing in the downstairs bar, a vinyl techno masterclass- minimal, sleek, machine music, emotive and huge sounding on the pub's recently upgraded sound system, causing quite a stir among the crowd and packing the space in front of the DJ booth out with dancers. 

I took this picture while Fearless was playing. It may not be in focus or even a vaguely coherent picture but it sums the night up quite well from where I was standing. 

Saturday night was split between upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs Duncan Gray played a house set and then Scott Fraser took over at midnight. Downstairs David Holmes headlined, picking up where Matt Hum left off. David has played The Golden Lion often in recent years. He changes his set every time, saying he doesn't plan it too much, just goes with the flow and the feel in the pub. His set on Saturday night was out of this world, a huge range of dance music, from spangly chuggers to amped up noise, breakbeats and the sudden switching to huge piano tracks. Towards the end of his set, a 2 am finish, I was stuck in a corner by the door, just enjoying the music and the volume. Joe Strummer's voice came out of the speakers, his famous 'people can do anything...' speech from a radio show followed by ecstatic synth noise (an unreleased Holmes and Matty Skylab track, David said afterwards). There was a pause at 2am and then two or three more tunes, one a rumbly, garage band guitar song, one an explosion of synth chords, a wall of noise, and then finishing with the huge, extended Leftside Wobble remix of Tomorrow Never Knows, The Beatles most experimental, most progressive song filling the pub and scrambling heads. Thoughts were indeed laid down and voids were very much surrendered to. 

Saturday afternoon was our turn to play again, The Flightpath Estate DJs given the privilege of being part of the proceedings. Me, Baz, Martin, Dan and Mark played throughout the afternoon and into the evening. At one point I looked out into the space in front of the booth and saw author David Keenan and White Rabbit Books publisher Lee Brackstone  dancing and singing along to a song I was playing, the magnificent One Of Those Things by Dexys, from 1985 (a song even Kevin Rowland eventually had to accept he'd ripped off from Warren Zevon's Werewolves Of London). 

One Of Those Things

I spoke to David Keenan at some point, excitedly telling him about the experience I had reading Xstabeth a few years ago, a book which at several points blew my mind a little. This photo has me and David, me somewhat out of focus, mind probably still blown. 

Saturday afternoon also saw the fabled raffle and auction, Claire Doll's hard work and creativity raising  thousands of pounds for charity, Weatherdolls and Sabres cross stitch and a box of records found in Andrew's lock up when it was cleared out, promo copies of the David Holmes remix of Smokebelch and other delights. Golden Lion landlady Gig conducted the auction action in her own inimitable style. Holmes bid for and won this Gnostic Sonics banner.

Sunday saw the crowds, fans, punters and artists drawn back to the pub and its beer garden, bathed in early April sunshine. Andrew's friends Sherman and Curley played dub and ambient sounds the whole afternoon. Meanwhile the Sunday afternoon literary event came in three parts- a Lee Brackstone hosted discussion with Andrew's partner of seventeen years Lizzie Walker, Two Lone Swordsman guitarist Chris Rotter, Ian Weatherall and The Flightpath's own Martin Brannagan, Lee asking the questions which included 'when did you first meet Andrew?' which drew a range of funny responses. 

The second part was Lee and David Keenan, an interview and a reading from his new book Volcanic Tongue. The third was Keenan interviewing  Adrian Sherwood, a fascinating half hour with one of Andrew's heroes, the main man of UK dub whose reminiscences and thoughts could and should fill a book. David Keenan (and David Holmes, sitting on the front row) unpicking all sorts of aspects of On U Sound and Sherwood's music and career and the nature of dub. Genuinely amazing to sit in on and as much a part of the weekend as the DJs and music. 

Adrian Sherwood The Producers Series #1

This hour long Sherwood mix comes from the Test Pressing blog, published back in 2010. The tracklist can be found at Test Pressing- Creation Rebel, African Head Charge, Dub Syndicate and Doctor Pablo all feature. 

Sunday night finished with the twin attack of The Jonny Halifax Invocation playing live upstairs and Sherwood DJing downstairs. Criminally I missed both- having been at The Lion since Friday night, suffering from a distinct lack of sleep and having to drive home at some point that night, I called it a day at around 6 pm. 

Everyone involved in AW62 should give themselves a well earned pat on the back and maybe have a bit of a lie down- Waka and Gig at The Golden Lion, Ian Weatherall, Claire, Lizzie and Curley with the raffle and auction and merch, all the DJs and bands, Lee and David bringing the literature angle (books and writing were as big for Mr Weatherall as music was). It was a brilliant weekend and event- heart warming and inclusive, packed with energising and exciting music, and filled with great people. The Lion always draws a lovely bunch of punters and AW62 was no exception. And when the lie down is over and everyone's recovered, more please next year...

Every Single Day Of My Life

We've just passed the halfway point in November and I know you shouldn't wish time away but we (me, Lou and Eliza) just need November to be over, done, gone. We knew November would be tough- a week today is Isaac's birthday, what would have been his twenty- fourth, and a week after that it's the first anniversary of his death. The fact that the calendar tells us it's nearly a year since he died is enough of a hurdle to get over. It doesn't seem like it can be a year when the pain of his death, the loss and the grief, are so real and present. It will soon become the point where we no longer count the time since he died in weeks or months but in years and that is a painful thing to deal with. I know we shouldn't get hung up on dates- they arbitrary in some ways and people keep saying 'the calendar may say it's a year but it's really not very long at all', which is true but still, a year sounds like a long time in some ways. Too long for him to have not been around. The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of the symptoms of grief, the physical and emotional effects, back to the surface. Things feel very raw again. I find myself going over the last few weeks and days of Isaac's life, reliving them in my head. It is taking its toll on all of us. 

Grief is very extreme and strange- there is 'it', the whole enormous thing of the emotional pain, the physical symptoms (I have found my tinnitus returning recently and I still have a partially unexplained and unshiftable sinus and congestion problem), the finding a new life without him, the loss, the having to deal with it on a daily basis, other people's reactions, all of that (and more)- 'it'. Then there is him, Isaac, the person, our son. Sometimes he gets swallowed up by 'it'. He gets lost inside it', disappears a bit inside all the pain. The last few weeks have been like that at times but they have also brought him back in a way. We all feel on the verge of something, constantly. There is a great big hole reappearing, his birthday and the anniversary of his death a week later, looming over us. We're not sure what we're going to do on those two days- go to see him at the cemetery, go for something to eat maybe. It feels like the huge empty hole that was created by his death has opened up again, a chasm of grief that we're now standing next to again. It's a chasm so big that if you dropped a pebble into it, you wouldn't hear it hit the bottom. I'm hoping that once we get past the 30th November the chasm will close up a little, that it will recede again, that we'll edge away from the lip of it. 

I burst into tears in the kitchen on Saturday morning. It took me by surprise in a way, I wasn't expecting it although I was feeling very out of sorts. I was doing breakfast and listening to Revolver by The Beatles (on my phone via Youtube, a truly shit way to listen to music, through tiny crappy speakers and interrupted by adverts). Got To Get You Into My Life burst into life, McCartney's punching bassline, those Motown inspired horns and Macca singing a perfect 1966 song, one that sounds like it's about a girl but is actually about smoking weed. As he belted out the words, 'I was alone, I took a ride/ I didn't know what I would find there...', I cracked and sobbed. I was on the edge of it anyway but something about the exuberance and joy in song hit me hard. Revolver was a big album for me when I was eighteen and nineteen, spring and summer of 1989, a time when all this pain and loss didn't exist, when it was all unknown and ahead of me. Maybe my subconscious was doing something. 

Got To Get You Into My Life

In thirteen years of writing this blog I've never written about The Beatles, fairly deliberately. I remember starting the blog and thinking the last thing the world needs is yet more words about The Beatles. But we are where we are, as people like to say, and I am where I am. Revolver is my favourite Beatles album, a record so fresh and inventive and full of life (although I can happily skip Yellow Submarine every time). McCartney's songs are surely his peak- Here, There And Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Got To Get You Into My Life and For No One are all immaculately written and played, McCartney audibly in sheer joy, a young man at the very top of the game. Harrison's I Want To Tell You is a stunner and Taxman is guitar music being taken elsewhere, those stinging guitar lines and the jumpy bassline (even if hearing rock stars whinge about tax sticks in the throat a bit). Lennon's songs are next level too with their wired, tangled, double tracked acid guitar lines. And Your Bird Can Sing, Dr Robert, I'm Only Sleeping are all as good as any other three minute guitar pop song he wrote and She Said is full on lysergic existentialism, in both words and music- the vicious guitar lines, the 2am discombobulation skewered in the line, 'She said 'I don't understand what you said'/ I said 'no, no, no, you're wrong'/ When I was a boy....'. Every song other than two comes in at under three minutes, no fat or surplus, short bursts of sparkling brilliance. Rain, written around the same time and put on the B-side (the B-side!) of Paperback Writer, is a song some groups would base their entire career around, psychedelia being invented with trippy drumming, backwards guitars, weird phasing effects and slurred, distant vocals. Lennon's next step was Strawberry Fields and A Day In the Life, but his songs on Revolver are essential in the road to those two places and superb in their own right. 

As Got To Get You Into My Life played on Saturday morning every single line seemed directed straight at me, not least the end and McCartney's closing couplet, 'And suddenly I see you/ Did I tell you that I need you/ Ever single day of my life'. I dreamt about Isaac on Saturday night/ Sunday morning, waking up just as it was getting light and very clearly seeing him. It threw me as it always does when I dream about him. He's still alive in my dreams and it often takes a moment to fully comprehend that it was a dream and that he's gone. It's very unsettling. 

Revolver is a dazzling and life affirming record, four young men using the studio as an instrument and with the freedom to do whatever they liked and cut through with slices of British life- the National Health Service, the UK tax system, Prime Ministers, London doctors/ drug dealers and Eleanor Rigby's suburban lost souls. Ultimately though on Revolver, all roads lead to Tomorrow Never Knows, the most forward thinking of their recordings, a psychedelic acid house record way ahead of its time, with thumping, looped drums, backwards guitars, processed vocals, tape loops and mad seagull sounds and Lennon's tripped out vocal suggesting/ demanding that we/ you, 'turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/ It is not dying/ It is not dying/ Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void/ It is shining/ It is shining'. As Tomorrow Never Knows played through on Saturday morning I was again briefly transported back to 1989 and a much younger me and then back to fifty two year old me, full of all this fucking horrible grief, wiping my wet eyes and thinking that Lennon's void and my chasm are two very different things. And also eventually, cheered slightly by the sheer energising magic of Tomorrow Never Knows and this line, buried in the middle of all that counter culture, spirit of '66 madness, 'That love is all/ And love is everyone/ It is knowing/ It is knowing'.

Tomorrow Never Knows