Fresh Earfood - Available Now!

I've put two new songs up on my Myspace page, which you can listen to if you want - 'Think Of England' and 'The Other Shoe'. Just click here. I'm afraid the recording quality is a bit scrappy (although better than my previous efforts), and it's clear at several key points that my reach exceeds my grasp vocals-wise, but if you can grimace and bear it through the caterwauling then why not check them out and let me know what you think.

I'm pretty pleased with the lyrics I came up with for 'Think Of England' - it's one of the few pieces I've written where it ended up coming out exactly how I'd conceived it, without sort of morphing or collapsing on the journey - but I always feel slightly fraudulent writing songs. I suppose I've come to terms with calling myself a 'poet', an 'author' and a 'writer', but 'musician' still sounds like a ridiculous leap, despite the fact I play songs to live audiences pretty much every week. Hopefully the live aspect keeps my feet on the ground a bit. I like to think that if every crowd I played to gradually lost the will to live each time I performed a uke song, I'd notice and phase them out of my set (the songs, not the crowd)... unless, of course, I'm so dazzling and charismatic that all concerns over quality of material get overridden, and what looks like positive feedback is just them all gazing, enraptured, at my massive visage.

So yeah, basically what I'm saying is I've done some stuff even I'm ambivalent about, yet I've chosen to display it to the world anyway. Oversharing, eh? It's the modern disease, I suppose.

Ukulele Record Breakers, Glastonbury and Horrific Torture

So here's a video of our attempt to break the world record for most ukuleles playing together at the London Ukulele Festival. I'd been there to open the Grass Ukes Stage, and also because they had an open mic, but I think the world record attempt was pretty much the biggest open mic I've ever been too! You can see me right in the middle of the shot with Tim Junior; I'm wearing a khaki shirt:



It was hella fun.

So today is Homework, the Aisle16 scratch night in Bethnal Green. Doors are at 7:30pm and it only costs three spondools, so you should come. Me, Chris Hicks and John Osborne are providing suppport with new material, then Luke's doing a full preview of his new Edinburgh show, The Petty Concerns Of Luke Wright, where he asks 'How does the desire to be loved by millions turn into an ego trip?'. It will be dead spesh.

I'm feeling pretty down at the moment. I suspect the reasons are threefold. One, publicity for We Can't All Be Astronauts is just about over now, so that's kind of it. Now, we just wait and see whether people buy it, and whether the people who read it like it and tell other people. I guess I'm feeling the post-party crash, and hoping I've done enough to not make it a pricey disappointment for my publishers. Having now been through the process of getting published, it's terrifying to see how much of a book's success or failure hinges on a handful of decisions by just a few people. Having someone pick it to review or decide to use it in a feature can mean the difference between a book reaching its target audience or sinking into obscurity. I'm not sure which of those categories Astronauts will fall into, yet.

Secondly, my grandma phoned and casually gave me the weather report for Glastonbury - torrential thunderstorms. People laugh about these things but constant rain ruins Glastonbury. Despite its history, as an outdoor event it doesn't deal well with bad weather and as a punter, five days of clammy, shivery vagrancy without anywhere to properly sit down is a dismal trial that saps your will to live. Last year was only good because, on Saturday afternoon, the rain relented, and, on Sunday, it was sunny. Sunday was glorious, and I had a great time. The rest of the festival was miserable. Not only that, but last year, we had the awning of Luke's caravan to shelter in, with camping chairs and a cooker and a kettle for tea. This year, we've got none of that - just little canvas cocoons to wriggle into, all sodden and wretched.

So yeah, I'm not looking forward to that. I feel very lucky that, as part of Aisle16, I've been able to perform at Glastonbury three years on the trot, to generally large and appreciative audiences in the big Cabaret Tent. Weather be damned, I love performing there and that's why I'm prepared to stick it out through all the grimness. I've got a grudging admiration for the kinds of people who seem able to shrug off the bad weather and enjoy themselves anyway - that takes a level of resilience I haven't developed yet - but, for me, the sight of a night time downpour blasting thousands of tiny tents just fills me with dread.

Finally, I think I feel bad because I woke up from a nightmare where I was being horribly tortured by a man who had discovered that I was a spy. I was pinned down, and he had a long, thin needle and he was moving it about fast, threatening to jab it into different parts of my body like the soft inside part of my elbow or the corner of my eye, and I was hysterically telling him that I'd confess everything, that I'd tell him what he wanted to know, he just had to stop because I couldn't concentrate if he kept punishing me, but he wouldn't, there was nothing I could do to stop him torturing me, but I knew that it'd be worse if I didn't talk and he wouldn't stop until I'd told him everything he wanted to know. I was hysterical and frantic and the worst thing was feeling like I had no control, like all the usual socialised mechanisms of getting a response out of someone weren't working, and there was nothing I could do to prevent my suffering - my options were 'bad' or 'worse'. I woke up gasping for air, my heart crashing in my chest.

I expect it was my fault for watching the videos from this post on Metafilter about the terrible human rights abuses that still go on today in the North Korean gulags. They're extremely disturbing, but I'm glad I watched them - it's obscene and outrageous that such atrocities continue to happen, although what the international community might be able to do about them is another, far thornier question. Certainly anyone thinking of going on a kooky North Korean government mandated 'sightseeing tour' of NK should think twice about pouring their tourist dollars into a grotesque totalitarian regime.

It's rare that something I've watched translates so quickly and so obviously into a dream. My sleep patterns have been all out of whack for the past week or so. I've had a couple of late night writing sessions that have turned into all-nighters, but also my hayfever was making being up in the day a pretty rubbish, wheezy experience, so I preferred to do my work at night, when the pollen count is lower. One of the effects of messing up your sleep patterns is your dreams become a lot more vivid and memorable. Irritating that they've become memorable-horrific rather than memorable-porny, but I'd rather have horror in my dreams and technicolour carnal theatre in my waking hours than the other way round.

Anyway, if you see me at Glastonbury, give me a hug, eh?

Announcing The Birth Of My Triplets

Over the last week or so I've been waking up with pretty vicious lacerations across my forearms, thighs and back. At first, I had no idea where they were coming from, then I discovered the culprit - my ukulele.

I started playing guitar when I was fifteen, and I've been playing ukulele for about a year and a half now. After picking up my Dad's ten quid uke and enjoying mucking around with it, I'd promised myself that, when I sold my first book, I'd treat myself to a proper ukulele. My Mum, however, wisely sensed that I might have some time to wait, and so came back from Southampton one evening with a ukulele she'd picked up in a music shop. She gave it to me with the wretched cowed anxiety of a peasant presenting a fattened calf to a feudal lord:

'Sorry,' she said. 'I just saw it and I couldn't resist.'

'Why are you sorry?'

'I thought you'd be angry.'

Just for the record, I have never flown into a rage on receiving a gift. I was really grateful.

'I thought you could use it in your shows,' she said, meaning my performance poetry gigs.

'Hmm,' I said, 'not likely.'

A month and a half later, I did my first ever live uke performance to a tent of about 250 people. The whole ukulele thing took me by surprise - I hardly ever play my guitar now, to the extent that I'm frighteningly crap when I pick one up.

The uke's just so easy to grab and strum - I've got two, and there's always one within reach when I sit and write. Various nocturnal twiddling sessions produced a few tunes that I started working into my sets. I found they broke up the poetry well, and they became such a mainstay that soon I began to wonder how I ever got through 20 minutes of pure spoken word.

I even started putting up a couple of vids of my work on youtube, including an entry to the 2008 Bushman World Ukulele Video Contest:


In fact, I was starting to get a little cocky, thinking I was quite the ukester, until I watched this youtube tutorial video from Jimmy of the Bobby McGees:

'What the Christing eff?' I exclaimed. When someone of Jimmy's stature tells you 'don't post a ukulele video until you've learned this technique,' you don't take that admonition lightly. I had trangressed. I still played with a heavy plastic plectrum, and I treated my uke like a little guitar, rather than respecting it as a distinct instrument.

Thus, I devoted the month of January to attempting to get to grips with concepts like triplets, the split stroke, and the fan stroke. One of the things I noticed on a lot of uke tutorial vids - a detail rarely commented on - was the uke players' grotesquely oversized fingernails. Time and again, I watched them coax lilting melodies from their instruments using huge yellow, misshapen talons.

So I decided, for the first time in my life, to grow my nails.

To understand the true gravity of this decision, you have to appreciate that I have been a lifelong nailbiter. Not just my fingernails, but the skin around them, and the skin in the crease on the backs of my thumbs. When I was playing guitar every day, (warning: this is pretty unsavoury) I'd often bite off the calluses on the end of my fingers, leaving raw, exposed flesh. Afterwards, I'd be unable to play guitar, or even pick up a hot mug for days. I go into graphic detail like this to impress upon you that it was a compulsion - I was addicted to biting my nails and fingers.

And yet... here I am a month later, all talony, knocking out my first flamenco-style split strokes and triplets. When my Mum saw my unscarred fingers, complete with actual nails, she cried. That's how awful the state of my hands usually is.

But every revolution has its price. Apparently, I scratch myself in my sleep. Until now, this hasn't been a problem, since I've had nothing but bloody stubs for fingertips. But these days, when I wake up, it's as if I've spent the night in a jumpsuit full of weasels. I've got track marks all down my arms, like one of those people who do drugs.

And my lovely new long fingernails are starting to look grim. Ladies, any tips on nail care? I'm horrified to realise that I may literally have to start giving myself a little manicure every week, especially if I'm relying on my nails for gigs.

Still, nobody said it was going to be a bowl of cherries. To finish, here's the obligatory Jake Shimabukuro vid, showing all of those techniques (and then some) being put into practice. What a colossal, colossal champ.