September 5, 2003
“Fantastic idea! Let’s sort it out over lunch next week. Can you pass the sugar, please?”
Meetings, meetings and more meetings.
This week has witnessed lots of talk about intriguing future possibilities over coffee and doughnuts, but little solid-gold easy action.
Making the effort to get external commitment and support to actualise plans can be time-consuming, emotionally draining and very, very frustrating. Not to mention, a constant threat to an already bulging waistline. Never quite work and never quite play, the business lunch is an uneasy hybrid of the two and infinitely less satisfying than either. Unless someone else is footing the bill, of course.
On the plus side, Burning Shed is a fortnight away from issuing some interesting new and archive releases, and some potentially exciting gigs in Germany and the UK are currently in the process of being arranged.
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Next week, myself and the man Wilson make our way to One Little Indian’s HQ for the first time in nearly a decade, with a view to co-ordinate the label’s proposed reissue programme of No-Man’s early work and compare what ten years can do to male hairlines.
As the reissues were something that we were approached over, rather than having initiated ourselves, the signs are promising. If successful, the result will be that the material from the ‘Lovesighs’ and ‘Loveblows And Lovecries’ eras will be resurrected and repackaged and that ‘Flowermouth’ will be served better than Third Stone’s recent cheap looking reissue of the album.
As with the period that led to the release of ‘Speak’, this reassessment of No-Man’s past will inevitably pose questions about the band’s present and future directions.
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Musically, I’ve been pledging allegiance to the funk and, in a very English approximation of disco dancing, raising my eyebrows in time to the beats of Funkadelic’s ‘One Nation Under A Groove’ and Talking Heads’ masterful ‘Remain In Light’ and underrated ‘Naked’. James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ has provided the literary foreground, while ‘Max’ has been the best celluloid experience since ‘Solaris’ and The Hours’.
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‘I dream of changes. I change my dreams.’