Monday's Long Song

My ongoing, erm, relationship (for want of a better word) with the number 23 continues. The walk up the canal towpath into town that I did a couple of times in the summer saw me come across a pair of graffiti 23s- from memory they were the only numbers among the many painted and tagged walls (apart from a 2-1 reference to the cup final, proper old school graffiti). I'm aware that confirmation bias means they may be the only numbers I noticed and that I might be looking out for them, subconsciously. The pair of graffiti 23s don't seem to be the work of the same artist. When we were in South London for the end of August bank holiday weekend we walked up the high street to get to the train station, turned a corner and I almost walked into this piece of street furniture...

At the start of the summer my brother in law and sister in law stayed the night with us before flying from Manchester airport. We went to one of the local pubs and while I stood at the bar ordering they went to find a table. More or less the only one free was this one...

Channel surfing one night I flicked the button and moved up from Channel 4 and onto a Channel 5 countdown of the Best Songs Of 1986 at this exact moment...

I don't think there's anything especially mystical about this. It's coincidence I'm sure. Other numbers appear all around us, I just don't notice them the same way. 

Isaac was twenty three when he died and his birthday is the 23rd November (we have that anniversary and the anniversary of his death (a week later, the 30th November) suddenly appearing in our view again. Both those dates last year were awful, the weeks building up to them especially. When he went into hospital in November 2021 with Covid I was a few chapters into Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds by John Higgs, a book about The KLF. I didn't pick it up again until a few weeks after he died and the first chapter I then read was about the number 23, its place in The KLF's mythology and the significance of the number in Discordianism (a religion or set of ideas invented by Greg Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley in the early 1960s, taking in some aspects of Zen coupled with absurdism and beliefs/ theories about order and disorder. You can get as much or as little from it as you like. The KLF take a lot from it but with them its always difficult to tell whether they're deadly serious or playing). What freaked me out reading the chapter back in December 2021, wracked with grief and loss and pain, was the number 23 and its concurrence with Isaac's life and death. After that, I started seeing twenty threes fairly often, not least this summer. Again, I know about confirmation bias and suspect that twenty three is a fairly commonly occurring number. But also, I've come to like it when I see one, it makes me smile- the only rule is that seeing or finding one has to be accidental, it can't happen as a result of deliberately looking for them- in some ways, it feels like a weird little connection to him.  

Jimmy Cauty of The KLF and Jem Finer of The Pogues have released an EP, four versions of a track titled The Hurdy- Gurdy Song, calling themselves Local Psycho And The Hurdy- Gurdy Orchestra. The three versions on the A-side of the 12" are all fairly short, between three and six minutes long, ambient/ rave celebrating the ancient and the current, the old stones that decorate our landscape and the year 2023. The B-side of the 12" is taken up entirely with The Stone Club Remix, a long version that is twenty three minutes long (of course it is). 

The Stone Club Remix is long with a very drawn out intro, bleeps, drones, the specific broken bagpipe- like drone of the hurdy- gurdy front and centre, noises, seagulls, a voice talking about the stones and about 'being the custodians of this place', echoes, found sound. Eventually, about thirteen minutes in a rhythm appears, drums of some sort, tapping away in the reverb smothered distance, through a haze. 

The EP is available at Bandcamp, digitally and on vinyl (although the vinyl was running very low when I wrote this post). Initially there were three hundred 12" singles in sleeves hand painted by Cauty and two hundred in plain sleeves. Two and three again.