A couple of weeks ago there was a violent thunderstorm here. There were distant rumblings before it, but when it struck it was absolutely overhead. There was no counting of seconds going on – to see how many miles away it might be. It was here, right above us. Whack!
It took out the TV box, the dish on the wall and the TV itself. Thankfully it didn’t destroy any of the computers. For that I was grateful. The lights were out for a few hours. Some of our neighbours were without power until the next afternoon. At least one pole transformer blew up and created quite a spectacle. It looked like a giant fireball throwing sparks and flame into the night.
So we were without the TV, which is substandard for older people living in the middle of nowhere. They might just have to get off their arses. Joking apart, we usually mess around with candles; and battery operated Christmas and New Year lights find their way onto the mantelpiece. Then the radio comes out and it’s old times again.. There are two simultaneous wishes. One that it stays off for a long time, the other, that it comes back on quickly.
Glad tidings of great jumble as I get a fire going. We’re back in the netherworld, talking about ‘other stuff’, with candlelight faces. As the fire lights the room, it feels like home again. The distant quieter home of scribbling notebook inspirations. The cat does his bit as well, he’s good at being spoilt with attention.
‘So what’s going to happen then?’ I think to myself, as I imagine the TV disappearing out of the room in the next few days. Hassle.. but that’s life now. Now that climate change is undeniably abroad, and complex technology has overtaken all of us. Hopefully, a new TV will not be necessary; along with more and more expensive 21st century gouging.
The darkness only lasts for a few hours. It’s then that I discover that the TV really is kaput. I can’t remember what happened next. Either I started playing the guitar or writing a poem, one of the two. It was the end of cosy, anyway. Tracy went to bed early, which is her want in any case.
The next day she brought the small TV down from the bedroom, and we scratched around setting it up, clearly against its will. She then phoned the local tech shop. She knows them better than I do. She’s a bit of a regular. I’m the one who has to phone the garage when the car needs to be attended to for its yearly test. Our responsibilities are roughly divided, although my days as Tarzan have faded over the last 15 years.
We obviously needed a new Sky box, and as it turned out, a new dish on the wall. Everything had been blown off the wall in the same moment. I was most reluctant to say goodbye to seven years of collected memories and research, but I had to admit, reluctantly, that copyright has to work. Bah!! Humbug!
The choices here in the sticks are not too good. Where else can I get cricket, PBS, Al Jazeera and channel 4 in the same place? We could probably go to Virgin, or to another of the local go-betweens, but a choice between Branson and anyone else leaves us in a truly dangling conversation, to quote an old mate of mine. I’ll do some research.. When I get a moment…
The word from the tech shop is good though. It seems that the TV can be fixed, which is really good news. When there’s thunder around, I usually go to the plugs and take them all out of the wall as quickly as possible. This time we were caught.
Sadly, we discovered the next day that a new house had been burned down just over the hill from us, which put our hassle into a more realistic perspective.
Day three was another picnic day. One of the sunniest days of the year, with a biting chill coming straight from the north east! The very worst direction. Straight from Svalbard.
Tracy has been fretting for weeks over my favourite poster being reproduced, and with good reason. We’ve been talking about it for years, but it’s finally happening. It took her at least a month to find a printer in Ireland who could produce screen prints. Tracy has been speaking to him for about a month. She was anxious because he didn’t seem to be there all the time, and was sometimes absent for days.
She was worried, I was concerned. Apologetically, he was back in touch with her the next day, telling her that he was in the middle of a family bereavement. Also saying that the posters had been printed, but were still at the factory. Then, just as quickly they were on the road to us.
They arrived a few days later, on the same morning as the repaired TV! So all hands were on deck.
Getting this poster onto art paper and up for sale has been a longwinded process. It involved months of conversations with my old friend Harry Pearse about how it should be done for the best. With all kinds of advice from him and Daren Howells at Pentagram, who has worked overtime, beyond the call of duty, putting all of it together, and eventually speaking with the printer in printer speak.
Meanwhile, with regard to the TV, our local tech shop is mainly manned by Poles. Good people doing a great job. I’m so pleased that we have people like that local to us. It’s a feelgood factor. Fellow blow-ins as well.
When it was hauled into place, the one guy plugged it up around the back as we started to set it up again. He seemed perplexed that we didn’t have a google account, which would have made set up a breeze. When Tracy logged in with her email and a password he smiled and said “Oh, you’re Mac people…”
So after setting up the basics, we said our farewells. Tracy replugged it round the back and left me with the remote, so that I could spend an hour or two getting it back into the sort of shape I can deal with.
Having had the smaller TV downstairs for the previous week, I’d had to go into its Q box Settings and alter things like Contrast (turned on so that I could read text from across the room that had become much smaller), etc., all kinds of little jobs, whittling away at time.
All my ‘Favourites’ had disappeared, so I had to scroll through the channels and put them back into ‘Favourites’ in something like the order they were in before the Almighty’s unwelcome intervention. The news channels are all in the first five ‘favourite’ channels, 1 to 5. All the stuff I like to keep my eyes on. There are other News outlets on YouTube, but I’m not going there right now…
Actually, I’ve now placed CNN at #1. It used to be #22. It’s the most entertaining late night/early morning destination for watching the political circus across the Atlantic. (which could feasibly alter financial and the economic stability around the world in the near future, on yet a new semi-permanent basis. Who knows? All I know is that democracy is under permanent threat globally).
Democracy! Mmmmm… ? (is a blog bubbling?)
So, in the second week back at the re-wilded ranch, the old folk are scrabbling around trying to deal with TV technology and a poster release; on the same day.
After she leaves me with the TV remote, she goes upstairs to open the posters. A strong smell of ink and Printing Works wafts around the house. They look amazing, and the paper they’re printed on is substantial. They are every bit as good as we could’ve imagined. I’m so grateful that we put so much energy into this because, if nothing else, they are class. I’m now realising that they’re as good as anything similar out there, at any price.
Which makes me think back to when the poster was first made in 1968, for pennies. Andy Mateou helped me to get that concert together. It was a first for both of us. I’d wanted to discover a new audience. I knew that they were out there, but it was a step in the dark. We both became trainee promoters. We were fairly useless, but at least we could advertise it at Les Cousins, the folk club he’d opened in 1965, in the cellar at 49 Greek Street, in the West End, where his parents ran their Greek Cypriot restaurant, Dionysus, upstairs.
As on the poster, you could buy a ticket at ‘Cousins’, Dobells Record Shop and Collett’s on Charing Cross Road where Gill Cook and latterly Hans Fried, who were both friendly faces, worked for years.
Andy arranged the manufacture of the poster. I have no idea who was employed to script the art. Whoever it was did a very professional job featuring 60’s style script. The word Hyperion appears on the poster, but that was possibly just the name of the small design company that made it. The phone number on the poster is an old 071 inner London number. (Correction: I made the mistake of going down a rabbit hole earlier today. Of course it’s a Birmingham number, but I can’t think for the life of me why, or how, Andy would have been in contact with someone in Birmingham; especially when at that time we would have been surrounded in West London by a host of local commercial designers. It seems unlikely that a concert in London would have been promoted from Birmingham, so what is on the poster in this respect will likely remain a mystery.)
The designer was obviously ‘dyed in the wool’ 60’s, so this is now an upgraded version of a period piece. I think that it stands out as a piece of art. Anyway, the concert took place on November 17th 1968.
At the time, I was being ostracised by a couple of attested but testy members of what was known in 1968 as ‘The Underground’. Even though I played at ‘Middle Earth’ etc., some folk couldn’t see further than my acoustic guitar. And even though I was using it with a wah-wah pedal on my first record in 1966? (to be ascertained, I’ll have to listen to the record again to discover what kind of pedal it is).
The title of this concert was part of my response, and is part of a longer story. I gave the concert/night the title of ‘From Underneath The Underground’.
I’m pretty sure that not many people saw that on the night, but I’m also sure that it’s been copied since. Unknowingly, of course.. 😉
I used to visit ‘Hanks’ and other guitar shops on Denmark Street. They were hang-outs for all of us who played string instruments. Then I’d wander back up the street, jaywalk across Charing Cross Road and duck into Manette Street, which ends in a little passage that comes out at the Pillar Of Hercules pub on Greek Street. On a hot summer day this used to be one of my favourite Paradise walks. It was my home between 1965 and the late 70s. Though ‘Cousins’ closed in ’72, I will make that walk forever. I become emotional thinking about that day. It was a very long hot day.
It was a brilliant ‘scene’ to be part of. So very many people were connected. Looking back, it seems like we were 1000’s of friends working for the future of the ethos we were part of. It was a beautiful day, and although many of us were marginally critical of each other, in hindsight, it was a very beautiful day.
Dedicated to the memory of Andy Mateo and ‘Les Cousins’.
