5th July 2000

Spent last Friday and Saturday in the studio doing some recording with a
young man named Dawson recording some of his warped pop. The King Of Pop
has taken this young pup under his wing and is trying to turn this
talented songwriter into the future of rock 'n' roll which will not be
easy as he was born after Punk. It is bad enough meeting people who were
born after Hendrix died but this chap was filling his pants when Johnny
Rotten was filling our living rooms with foul language. They say that
policemen are looking younger these days and this also applies to pop
upstarts like Dawson. When his stuff is up at peoplesound.com I will let
you know so you can check out this precocious talent for yourself. Spent
Sunday with a guy called David Prince who interviewed all the members of
FGTH for an article he has done for Spin magazine in the US. We went to a
pub in Hackney with a cool kitten called Helen and had a fab lunch and a
couple of beers. On the subject of Hackney I went to see my mate Martin
Russell ( he mastered Ripe ) at a studio down there where he is camped out
with the rest of his Afro Celt chaps. For those of you who don't know
about Afro Celt Sound System then check out either of their two albums on
Real World. The material is a groove based soup featuring some great
musicians mashing it on top of the groove. Tuesday was our 14th wedding
anniversary so me and Mrs Nash went out and celebrated with a large Korean
but I refrained from drinking too much because I was recording another
band the next day in the studio and there is nothing worse than listening
to drums for three hours with a throbbing head. The studio time has been
booked in Kidwelly and the Hairy Pie Musical Collective will be assembled
on the 14th August to rock the house in a righteous fashion and lay down
the rest of the backing tracks for "Le Grande Fromage". Even Nigey Nige
has promised to be there despite being the busiest man in Wales. I met a
great guy who turned up at my studio to tune my piano. His name was Alec
and he is a piano tuner at the BBC and does all the stars. He spent three
hours in my studio drinking tea and chatting about people he had met and
talking about the industry. I think this is another to file under great
encounters with interesting folk. I will close by asking for reviews of
any of my music from anyone who reads this because there will be a review
section on the new site so if you would like to be included then mail me
your words. Finally, my faith in the music industry was renewed this week
when I bought the Coldplay single "Yellow". I saw the video on Jo Whiley a
couple of weeks ago and thought the tune was great. It is not often I hear
something that moves me and when I heard this record I was certainly
moved. I would liken it to the first time I heard "Supersonic" by Oasis
and I knew they were going to be huge. I get the same feeling about
Coldplay but only time will tell if I'm right. If they have other tunes as
good as this one they could be unstoppable. Anyway TTFN.