Angelsstandcorrected

Here’s a little videoblog I made yesterday night on the handycam for the fish myspace site. The chaos of the last week has subsided and things are trundling along in a merry fashion.

I am off to the freak show at Venice beach tomorrow and am unfortunately having to accompany Linda Perry and J to see Patti Smith tonight so an evening of bad poetry and incompetent rock is assured – let you know how that turns out. A small thing but in LA they don’t call you on the telephone – they “reach out” ha ha ha….I think all the sunshine has melted their brains.

Read Full Post »

Argggh…Here’s a little clip of the fish in their musical aquarium, splish splashing around. it’s all been a little fraught of late, but I’m sure it will improve ……

Read Full Post »

I awake at the wrong time and have to go get a car. The only vehicle available is the size of a small truck. I can’t see to the edges of the SUV and immediately get pulled over by a very spiky LA county Sheriff on a bike (no, not a push bike, a motorbike) – for, and get this – lane straddling. I tried to say that I was new to the USA and had only just picked up the vehicle, but he didn’t care. just stared at me as if his jodpurs were a size too small (why do they wear jodpurs and jackboots?). In the US, unlike the UK you must not get out of the vehicle when they stop you – this is very important. If you do, you will find yourself looking down the barrel of a gun. Your supposed to sit in the vehicle and wait. He wrote me a ticket….this is going well I thought.

Finally I am at the Kung Fu Garden it’s nothing like a Chinese restaurant. The studio is a marvelous caricature of any and all recording studios of note – there’s something Spinal Tap about it and it’s infuriatingly poorly lit – but that’s the film maker in me – can’t get enough light, especially in the dark. The guitar collection is amazing, as are the photographs along the walls it’s a kind of museum of melody. Linda is small and intense, tattooed and gruff, yet I detect sensitivity and insight under the tough cookie wrapping. I like her – she tells me off….”get filming your not here on holiday”

Read Full Post »

So I arrived in LA, picked up in a blacked out Lincoln town car by an Algerian guy who had a host of LA stories that I didn’t want to hear. I turned my ears off. Dragging through the LA rush hour traffic the journey was interminable. After the hour wait at immigration it was as if I was in a really boring Fassbinder movie (they are all really boring – if you don’t know them – don’t bother). I arrived at the apartment that I am sharing with J and N from the band Little Fish. I was met by Ben from their record company surprisingly he was not 2 feet tall, but a normal human being – somehow in my head he had been morphed into a dark suited blackberry wielding dwarf. Not so….Inside the building reminds me of Resident Evil.

In the apartment there’s a note from J and no food, no bedroom, no nothing. Well it’s ok I can sleep on a sofa, after 10 weeks of freaks on a bus this is gonna be a cake walk. There’s nothing to do. I am jet lagged and have no car, can’t rent one till the morning – I find a bar – the Universal Bar and Grill, inside there’s a barely live band comprising of a fat Japanese girl in a tutu, a mullet wearing a guitar, and an invisible drummer hidden behind a gigantic drum kit. Everyone in the bar is like a failed extra from the Rockford files. I settle on a bar stool to sip a few beers and be told that I’m cute by the bar girl. Tired, my head spins from the beer and clockwrongness and I have to sleep. I retire hurt to the sofa, some hours later J and N burst into the apartment like clowns at a funeral. It’s a good start….Tomorrow I would meet growling Linda Perry at her studio – Kung Fu Gardens…

Read Full Post »