I veer between “Wayne’s World” levels of confidence and extreme terror about the gig at the ICA. Ronan asked me why anyone would come along, and I said “What? You’re joking – it’s Spearmint! at the ICA! Playing “A Week Away” live! of course they’ll come!” He also asked me why anyone in London would bother coming to see a band from Leicester (The Junipers) and I confidently explained “Listen, when a band is that good, they are going to pull a crowd wherever they go!”

At other times I am worried about it though… suppose nobody comes, suppose we are rubbish… I had one of my recurring anxiety dreams last night: the one where I am being tormented by a large bee or wasp. Bridie woke me up because I was crying out and jerking about. My other two regular dreams are being naked in a public place and either having an exam or a gig that I suddenly realised I am totally unprepared for. I suppose the worst that could happen is a handful of people at the ICA watching me sitting an exam naked and unprepared onstage while being tormented by a large bee or wasp.

We have been very busy getting the album ready. I have just signed off the master and it sounds great. We decided to lose one of the extra tracks in the end (poor old “A Mild Mannered Man”) as it was getting too long to fit onto one CD. Jim is pulling the artwork together and had designed a very nice postcard which we will use to promote the gig. Still a lot to do for the artwork – we need to compile all the lyrics and images then lay out the booklet. Jim’s friends Jean and James are going to interview each of us for a short film which will show before we play the album live.

We went to see The Pretenders the other night at the Shepherds Bush Empire. They were great and I have come to really like that venue. Last week we took my mum to see a 50s show called “Dreamboats And Petticoats” at The Grand Theatre in Leeds. The show was good fun, but the main pleasure for me was going back to the Grand where I used to go to watch bands as a kid. It is a brilliant theatre and I always dreamed of playing there when I grew up. I still do. One of the things about being in a band is that whenever I go to see other bands I find myself wondering whether or not I would want us to play in the venue. Bridie and I went to see Kraftwerk at The Town Hall in Auckland last year. What a great venue! Just the shape of it is enough to dream of playing there. I don’t own any Kraftwerk albums. I have always quite liked them, but avoided seeing them live originally, thinking “it will just be four blokes stood there behind keyboards”. So we went along to give it a try, and when the curtain rose, there they were – four blokes stood there behind laptops. They were great though, and the robots did the encore. I must get the albums.
Also went to see “Moon” last week, which is a really great sci-fi movie, an instant classic, on a par with the best from the 70s. And there has already been a classic vampire movie this year: “Let The Right One In”. We also saw “Bruno” last week which was very funny, though I notice people are getting snooty about it, constantly comparing it to his other stuff, and saying it is disappointing. The fact is it is great and the first film this year I have immediately wanted to watch again. I remember when “Fawlty Towers” was first aired, on BBC 2 I think, it got a really bad response, with critics saying what a shame it was that Cleese had gone so mainstream after Monty Python. It was later re-run on BBC1 and suddenly it was a huge success. After a gap, they made series 2, and that got really bad reviews as apparently it was nowhere near as good as the first season. Critics – what is the point of them? “Anti Christ” is a cool film too. Thanks to the fuss about it being a genuinely graphic 18 cert, we were able to watch it on a big screen in town. It is great – proper film-making. Thank you Lars Von Trier.
Bridie has a flash new phone. My phone hasn’t even got an apostrophe in it. I get funny about other people adding apostrophes where they are not needed, but I have to leave them out where they are needed. It is the first phone Bridie has had with a built-in camera. So she is taking lots of photos, including those ones that look great but you don’t take, like of your foot or chin or the pavement… She is building up a great collection, but isn’t able to get them onto the computer yet, so I resort to including this shot I took of a laundremat in Innsbruck.

(Soundtrack: Regina Spektor “Far”, Charles Mingus “Oh Yeah”) . We have been busy planning Spearmint activity for September. We are releasing a new version of our first album “A Week Away”. Pete is currently remastering it from debris of mixes and versions sprawled across a sea of DAT tapes – DAT was the industry standard for masters ten years ago when we made it. It was originally mastered at Abbey Road, but I am convinced Pete and do a better job of it. We are re-instating the single version of “A Trip Into Space”, which we feel is superior; it will also have the full unfaded ending. . We have also recorded seven new songs intended for a ten inch EP to be released alongside it. I have been searching for extra tracks to add to “A Week Away”, but of course most of them are already featured on “Songs For The Colour Yellow” which accompanied the album originally. After a sobering financial review, we have decided to add the seven new tracks to the “A Week Away” CD rather than releasing them on a separate EP. I think this will work well, as they do share a theme with the original album. . In addition to that, there are five b-sides from the time which did not fit onto “Songs For The Colour Yellow”, so they can also be included. Hence the new version of the CD will comprise “A Week Away” remastered, the new seven song cycle, plus the five extra tracks. . We have also decided to include lyrics having originally resisted this. I have been convinced over the years, mainly by people for whom English is not their first language, that this really helps. I didn’t like the idea initially, as seeing them written seems to imply they should work written, which they don’t, as they are lyrics, not poetry. But I have warmed to the idea and was happy to include them with the Shirley Lee album and now this. . We also plan to play the “A Week Away” album live in full for the first time, at the ICA in London, and on some German dates. Jim, Si, Ronan and I have always wanted to play at the ICA – I remember us talking about it ten years ago, so it will be a treat to finally do it. We have fixed the date: Wednesday 30th September. The Junipers, who we saw live in Liverpool are going to play with us, which is great, as they are wonderful – so nice when you find a band who are that good! . Jim is keen to create a short film about “A Week Away” to show at the gigs, so we met his friend Jean last week to start planning that. Jim’s idea is to make it as much of an event as possible, which is great. We are also DJing at “How Does It Feel” on Friday 4th September, which is the day that the movie “500 Days Of Summer” opens. Apparently one of the main characters in this film says either “of course, the band you should be listening to is Spearmint”, or “Spearmint are the best band in the world”, or something, so I guess we can all go see the movie before DJing. Knowing our luck we will have been subtly misinformed and the quote will be something slightly different like “Spearmint are a great big pile of steaming shit”. . I was in a movie once: “Stormy Monday” by Mike Figgis, with Sean Bean, Melanie Griffith and Sting. This was when I was living in Newcastle – I was paid twenty pounds to be an extra for the day, which I thought was amazing money at the time. It was mostly spent hanging around with rest of the extras in a hall near the river where I later saw The Fall play – can’t remember its name. I never saw Sting, but Melanie Griffith came into the room once with a fur coat draped over shoulders and starting complaining in a shrill Marilyn voice. I thought she was awful, but I have since come to really like her in “Celebrity” and “Cecil B Demented”. I did two scenes, the first was walking into the Jazz Club with a girl, which seemed to go quite well. Afterwards Mike Figgis came over to us, all frizzy gingery hair and long denim collars – how camp he seemed, yet all he did was flirt with the girl, telling her how well she had walked into the Jazz Club. He didn’t acknowledge me. I wasn’t impressed, but of course, he went on to make some great films, including “Leaving Las Vegas”. The second was a crowd scene involving Sean Bean where some guy is smashing a window with a bottle. This made it into the movie and I can be seen about ten to fifteen minutes in I think, bobbing around at the back of the crowd with short hair and big bomber jacket, over-acting in fact. . Am going to try putting full stops between the paragraphs to try and introduce some spaces. Might look rubbish, but might work. . I like this Mingus album – he gets a big fat bottom end on his records, using a big band approach – really heavy. The only downside is that each of his albums seems to include one track that sounds like “Remember You’re A Womble”. Having come to Jazz backwards, via Soul, I initially found Ornette Coleman too mad for me. I have gradually been warming to him though, and Bridie and I went to see him play live on the Southbank (he has curated this year’s Meltdown Festival). He was amazing live and we feel really luck to have got to see him. . London is Michael Jackson crazy following his death a week ago. A shrine has sprung up outside the stage show on Shaftsbury Avenue – photos, flowers and sweet letters written in faltering broken English. It is touching and reminiscent of the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. I suppose the fans of both those people are happy to sanctify them and it seems inevitable, and appropriate. His records can be heard everywhere, with “Man In The Mirror” seeming to be the front runner. I am quite happy to hear him so much, and I always thought “Man In The Mirror” was under-rated, as the lyric is stunning. Strange that my “Show You The Way To Go” which was massive at the time, and is my favourite, never gets played. “Farewell My Summer Love” doesn’t seem to get enough attention either. . We heard the news on the radio, late, in bed. It reminded me most of hearing about Elvis’s death, which I am old enough to remember. Back then I was lying in bed listening to John Peel, and odd vague reports starting to come through that Elvis was dead, until eventually they were confirmed. It was the same with Jackson – initially it was that “a man had collapsed and been resuscitated in Neverland”… then later that the man was Michael Jackson… then later that he was dead. It was truly shocking and very very sad. . I was lucky enough to see him live twice. Three times in fact, if you count the Brits where Cocker slipped onstage. I saw him on the “Bad” and “Dangerous” tours. Both shows were brilliant, but the first one particularly blew me away, especially the opening ten minutes. I have never been so excited at a show – I was lucky not to have a cardiac arrest myself at that point! I grew up watching Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies – there is something about watching a man dance that briliantly that is amazing. It is great to see any dancing, but there is something about watching a guy, or a group of guys that is special. Michael Jackson had that magic, something heart-stopping and the way he moved, and to see that live was as good as it gets. . Michael Bradshaw (Dunston’s very own King Of Pop) used to rip him off all the time when we were in Laverne & Shirley. He was such an inspiration. I remember the day after Elvis died, I heard Cliff Richard on the radio and Cliff was really angry – angry at Elvis and angry at the people around him for letting things get so bad and letting him end like that. I wanted Michael to win. I wanted him to do the fifty shows at the O2 and amaze the world at his brilliance. He will be missed very much. Though in a way we have been missing him for fifteen years or so… He did well to make it to fifty years old; Elvis was only, what, forty-three?

(Soundtrack: Wayne Jarrett “Showcase”)
We just did a handful of gigs around England. Which always raises the question “why do gigs around England?”. The problem being that once we pay for a van and a driver and a cheap hotel, we lose a load of money. If you can get someone to drive for free, and you own a van, and are comfie sleeping on someone’s floor, then you can make it work. I didn’t want to put the guys through that this time, so it cost a packet – in fact the money that I had managed to save by working for the last couple of months all went on these few gigs. By playing in your home-town, which for us happens to be London, you can at least break even, but venturing anywhere that needs a stop-over costs a lot, so we certainly did not do these gigs for the money.
If we were doing them to “build our following” then that would be akin to painting the Forth Bridge with a toothbrush.  Although at least then the bridge would eventually get painted…  Perhaps it would be more akin to painting the Forth Bridge with a toothbrush and using paint which washes off in the rain. Maybe if we were out gigging most nights we could make some inroads, but a handful of shows around each album is never going to make a difference.
If we were using it as an excuse to get together and have a laugh with the band, then it definitely worked – we had a good old time listening to Bill Withers in the van, drinking too much beer, analysing life and eating chips. But then we could have got together to do all that and had a good night out in London for a fraction of the cost.
We did enjoy playing the songs though, and even though there were hardly any people at some gigs, and at some shows the crowd were just talking while we played, we still felt like we played well and were proud of what we were doing. Those moments, and at least one great gig made it worthwhile. After all, does a band really exist if it doesn’t play together in front of an audience? And it may be a chiche, but there is no substitute for playing live in order to sort songs out, to move them forward.
When we were in Liverpool it seemed there was live music blasting out of every bar. There were also several 90s nights on, which I notice are starting to appear. Up to ten years after a decade is over, it seems that it lacks a real personality compared to previous decades, then it gradually comes into focus until about twenty years after, it gains nostalgia value and you find yourself liking things that you hated at the time. It is happening now with the 80s. Bands are now making records trying to deliberately recreate the 80s. Just like they did in the 80s with the 60s, when Mod or The Smiths or The Las all owed huge debts to the 60s. Or in the 70s bands were fixated with the 50s. I guess it is about playing with the sounds you grew up with, or records that your parents liked. So 90s nights currently seems a little odd, but will become commonplace. What will there be in ten years time? Noughties nights? Which is bad enough, but what ten years after that? What do you even call that decade?
Andy did a ridiculous thing of playing our gig in Leeds, then getting the first train to London the next morning to rehearse with Weller, then getting the train to Liverpool to play a festival show with us at 5, then a doing a gig of his own at 9, then another show with us at 10 then another solo show at 11, then up first thing to get back to London to do a gig with Weller the next day. Inevitably, this ambitious plan ended with him missing our tea-time show and arriving back in Liverpool as he was due to go onstage at 9 – apart from the tea-time show it all went well though. That was a rotten set – us playing songs with no bass – though I suspect it would have been rotten anyway. Our 10 o’clock show was fab though.
Bridie and I went to a comedy show in Portobello the other night. Stewart Lee was excellent as ever, but the main attraction for me was Brian Gittings. Few people have reduced me to hysterics in my life: Peter Sellers as Clouseau, Ted Chippington, Harpo Marx, Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and a theatre group from Brighton called “Cliffhanger” spring to mind, but it doesn’t happen often. My very favourite, Larry David, causes me to get over-excited and thrilled by the brilliance of “Curb”, but never has me in hysterics. We have seen Brian Gittings before, and as soon as he comes on I start crying with laughter, and can’t stop until he goes off. It is extremely painful actually, but I suppose it is good for me.
We had a good time visiting Lille – it has a lovely old quarter for tourists, but feels very much alive as a town. It is currently over-run by giant black babies called the devil’s babies – see the photo. Now back in West London the temperature has shot up. We are back to drinking red stripe and photgraphing ducks – except Philbert, the unphotographable duck du jour. This is when the Uxbridge Road comes into its own – it all makes sense on hot summer days, and especially hot summer nights. Hence I am playing reggae loud!