17. 2. 2012

Aiaiai, it's that old refrain again about time flying etc. That roundtable session with Macca, complete with internet streaming, seems like an age away. Needless to say that Macca was his usual sociable self, chatting affably, interestingly, even, about those old 30s and 40s songs he has revived for his latest album. Much better than Rod Stewart's similar ventures into similar American Songbook territory.

Just listening to the new album from Mary "Madder Rose/Saint Low" Lorson & The Soubrettes - track 6, "Burnbabyburn", what a peach of a slow-burning, shimmering lap-steel waltz...

There was also the Leonard Cohen do, an incredibly funny performance during, first, an "interview" by Jarvis Cocker, and then a Q & A with assorted members of the press, as described here: http://www.drs3.ch/www/de/drs3/sendungen/top/318619.depeche-aus-london-eine-audienz-mit-laughing-lenny.html (sorry, the hyperlinking facility with this software just doesn't work).

And then I was in Zurich again, with some great records (The Lovely Eggs, Errors, Soft Rocks, my pal Robert's Rotifer, etc) for my usual appearance at DRS3, Sounds! (may I use this opportunity to remind the kind reader of my weekly column for the Sounds! website, reachable through the above link). The lovely Viktor from El Lokal was made to celebrate his 60th birthday very much against his own will - Pete Molinari flew in especially for wonderful solo performance, choosing the tone of his banter just perfectly. Back in London, I finally got round to writing the architecture stories resulting from the October trip to Washington - intense and time-consuming work, because the subject and thus the vocabulary was so unusual for me. Hugely interesting, of course. The past week, finally, I've been spending a lot of time with 32 art students from Lucerne, in London for a fortnight for a project involving the town and song lyrics.

17. 1. 2012

A couple of interesting encounters - first: Twiggy. On her new album she covers some of her favourite songs, old and newish. She was a joy to talk to, bubbly, sharp, funny and interesting. One of her thoughts: ironic that two models who came to sort of embody the Zeitgeist of their generation, Twiggy and Kate Moss, both in no way conformed to the "guide lines" of the fashion industry for aspiring models - both were too thin as well as too short, and their faces were "different" rather than pretty. Funnily enough, Twiggy went to the school right next to the house where I rented my first room when I arrived in London. The school in Salusbury Road, Queens Park, is now a Muslim school and belongs to Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam.

I also met Enter Shikari, very young, very successful and yet completely on their own terms. On their third album now, they're still on their own indie label, and yet, they can sell out a Hammersmith Odeon. Amazing: they did not know that Punks habitually gobbed on each other at concerts! The dressing rooms at venues aren't what they once were any more either. I met the band at the Borderline where they played a very small warm up show for their fans. The dressing room here used to be on a par in terms of awfulness with the legendarily awful hole at the Marquee. Now, everything is spick and span, there's even a brand new shower - and not a spliff end anywhere in sight!

15. 1. 2012

Before I forget it: The kind people of Radio DRS3 who let me write a weekly column for the Facebook page of Sounds! have suggested I start tweeting. So I tweet now. Oh dear. Just look for "Hanspeter Kuenzler", and there I am.

Went to a couple of football matches, both of them exceptional in their different ways. The first was Arsenal v. Leeds United in the FA Cup. It was written in the stars, of course, that the pied piper of modern English - or at least: Arsenal - football, Thierry Henry would score the only goal of the match within ten minutes of coming on. Even the Leeds manager's demeanour afterwards suggested that everyone in that team had known from the beginning that nothing whatsoever could be done to prevent such an outcome. Monsieur Wenger, the gallic Arsenal manager (for those familiar only with darts and croquet), suggested afterwards that everyone was "very happy" in the Arsenal showers. Well, I can't imagine the likes of Arshavin and Chamakh to be particularly happy, having been shown up so badly by a footballing grandad when they themselves have failed so miserably for weeks, if not months, to hit the target. In two hundred years there will be hundreds of versions of the old folk song "The Ballad of Thierry Henry", possibly the only song known to the British Folkies in the year 2525 that will extol the virtues of a French hero!

The other game was last Saturday, Millwall v. Birmingham. I just fancied some good, honest second division toil, I guess. Millwall is not at all the skinhead battle ground of yore. Still, some of the chants on the terraces weren't exactly family fodder. There was a good reason for this, however. Millwall started off well, dominating proceedings and missing various gilt-edged chances. And then, Birmingham scored with butcher-like precision and merciless efficiency. Everyone's main focus was Nikola Zigic, the unfeasibly tall and gangly B'ham striker. The Serb put on one of the most singularily provocative and irritating performances I've ever seen on a football pitch (apart from the surreally hackle-raising perma-performance that was Cristiano Ronaldo). Throwing himself over every foot placed innocently somewhere in his vicinity, dying a dozen tragic swan-deaths and complaining incessantly to the referee, he soon got under the Lions' skin. Result: shortly after the goal, one of their team trod on Zigic (at least, that's what the ref's report said - no one in the press box had seen what had happened, and the television cameras had missed it as well, as it turned out). Red, of course. This was followed shortly by a second red, this time for a double-footed challenge (said the ref), again on Zigic. The result in the end: 0:6, and a crowd baying for blood. Both reds were harsh, reckoned a distracted looking Millwall manager. "At least the second was a clear sending-off", thought the man from B'ham - who also expressed an opinion that Zigic had behaved impeccably throughout. For a brief moment I contemplated falling off my chair with a pained howl, crying foul.

12. 1. 2012

My reading matter over the festive period: "The Vulcan Story", "The Fob's Kid Syndrome", "Avro Vulcan - Britain's Famous Delta-Wing V-Bomber", "50 Years of Vulcan XH588", "Vulcan 607", and - best of all - "Avro Vulcan - Owners' Workshop Manual (1952 ownwards ((B2 model))". The last mentioned in particular is a real page turner...it even explains to me how the navigator's joystick works. Which is quite a feat of surreal pointlessness, seeing that there is only one single Vulcan in existence. It is parked in a hangar at Robin Hood Airport in Darlington and lovingly tended to by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust.

Doncaster is, at first sight, a pretty dismal place, denuded, like so many medium-sized British towns, of any character, and populated mostly by chavs, horse people, plane spotters and the members of the excellent women's football team (ludicrous generalisation, I'm sure). I was up there the other day because of a commission from Watch International mag to write a story about said last Vulcan. I'm not generally up on military technology, but I must say, seeing this airplane close up is quite something. Every nut and bolt and battered piece of metal oozes style, craft and innovation. I interviewed Dr. Robert Pleming who initiated the Save-the-Vulcan scheme, and Martin Withers who piloted the Vulcan which destroyed part of the Port Stanley runway with the first bomb ever dropped in earnest by a Vulcan early on in the Falklands war.

It is deeply ironic that the Vulcan saw its only bit of war action by default in 1982, when it turned out that it was the only plane capable of reaching the Falklands in reasonable time and carrying a couple of bombs whilst doing so. The Vulcan was designed to carry nuclear bombs, a deterrent in the Cold War. Fascinating, to delve into this recent phase of our past - surreal and not a little frightening, to read about how big scale paranoia turned the whole world (except Tonga, perhaps) into a shadow world of threats, subterfuge and feverish technological development.

PS: for some strange reason, the software just doesn't let me change the captions for the picture. Well, I trust it's pretty obvious it's not a paper plane.