26th September

September 26, 2002

Consider me chastised!

An email from a fan suggested that there was little point in me having a diary page without me actually having written a diary on it. A reasonable point, I suppose.

The last month has been quite frantic –

8 days in the wonderful City of Toronto, more work on the new No-Man and Bowness/Chilvers albums and the setting up of a Burning Shed mini-festival in Norwich and two dates in Athens (co-headlining with Roger Eno). Add the start of a Cultural Studies course, e-flurries galore and the fact that I’ve been socialising at a level equivalent to that of Tara Palmer Tompkinson at her most decadent and there’s some good excuses for not doing this.

Toronto was big, bright, cultured and still alive at 3am. Inevitably, I loved it.

Along with our gracious guide Diane, we took in the City sites, the International Film Festival and the obligatory CN Tower and Niagra experiences. Strange delights included finding the Peter Pan statue in Glenn Gould Park, seeing directors such as Peter Mullen and Michael Almereyda discuss their work and sitting on the rocks by Lake Ontario at midnight marvelling at the glowing downtown core.

The Bowness/Chilvers performance was intimate and strong, the response superb. If not the most well-attended gig, it was certainly one of the most special. The audience enthusiasm and warmth was infectious and worth the trip alone.

While there, myself and Lord Chilvers (who, true to form, dined on caviar most evenings) wrote a couple of new pieces while gazing at a fantastically panoramic view of the City from our 29th floor window. Whether it’s changed the nature of our work or not, I’m not sure. The songs still sounded more miserable than old man Steptoe with a hernia to me, and that’s perhaps as it should be.

I could blather on about Pedro Almodovar, Asa Chang, Peter Gabriel, Underworld, Terry Gilliam, Roland Barthes and other cultural highlights of the last few weeks, but I fear I might bore even myself.

Until next month?