i lose track of it all until i bring myself back to it

i painted a picture of a house and now i have to live in it

You ever lose yourself completely? And then as you come back to yourself you find all the fragments of yourself in all the things you’ve ever written down, reflected back at you in your friends and family members. In all your things. I set up my hi-fi after 4 years of it gathering dust, and then I listened to a CD on it. I remembered the kinds of person I’ve been and what it felt like to be her. And then it ended and I returned to silence, but it showed me a glimmer, brought back an old feeling. A week later someone pointed out that one of the speakers was upside down which made me laugh at a version of myself trying to do something productive and almost getting it right.

i’ve been watching these tadpoles grow

For the couple of years whenever anyone has asked me what music I’ve been listening to I haven’t had a good answer because I stopped really being able to listen to music the way I used to. It was through music that I learned how to love, how to be interested, how to feel seen, and it was strange to lose a lot of that for a while. I’ve been able to only pour outwards, not inwards. Everything I listened to set off a violent chain of emotional responses that was too much. Or it set off nothing and I experienced nothing but slight discomfort. Books never had that same effect, thank god. A book can drip feed in. Lately I’ve been slowly, slowly reading Moby Dick, squeezing in other books on the way whenever it feels too dense to pick up - Gabor Mate’s Myth Of Normal (very good), Anne Cameron’s Daughters Of Copper Woman (profoundly affecting), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (only just begun) and a book of poems by Cavafy given to me by a fan in Athens (thank you).

I stopped going to see as much live music over the past few years after spending most of the previous 10 years going to or playing 1-5 shows a week. Something in me just disappeared. It’s affirming to find pieces of it again, to know that it comes back if you keep going through the motions. Learning to trust the process, to let go of the things that haven’t returned. Other things emerge too when you practice them. It’s interesting to see what comes out when a lot of things stop being able to go in.

I know it’s been a while since my last post. I mean to write every time I get an email to tell me I have a new subscriber (thanks and hey), but I’ve been working away at different projects and touring, so I’ve been too preoccupied to be able to process what’s going on around me in this medium. As usual I’ll keep trying whenever I can, thanks for sticking around. Ideas are coming to me again now.

one of the projects included living next door to these sheep in somerset for a few weeks

Announcing the end of Porridge Radio allowed a new feeling to emerge. I’ve been able to imagine other possible futures. Other ways of being. A new kind of creative freedom. Our final tours (all the dates are here except for one… tba ;) ) have felt like a mix of everything, a milkshake, but one thing I keep feeling is that the audiences are making the shows feel religious, as if everyone there is deeply inside each show with us. And the only way I can perform well is if I walk on a tightrope between being mentally present in the room, and letting go completely so I’m not really there, allowing myself to disconnect and for muscle memory to take over. It’s a delicate balance - think too much and it’s over. Think too little and it’s also over.

salute from istanbul hotel room

It’s been so freeing and fun to know that this project has reached its natural end, that we get to tour it out and say goodbye properly, and that the parts of it that feel constricting won’t last forever. Sometimes it feels like I’ve painted a picture of a house and everything in it that I need to live in, but I don’t really like the things inside. Now I can paint a new house. I didn’t know we’d announce the end of the band until the day before we did, I kind of thought it would just be something we all quietly knew and announced when the tours were over. I’m glad we said it out loud because I think it’s made these final shows more powerful and more fun and more freeing.

And everywhere we go, I’m taking it all in in new ways and enjoying it. We were in Athens and Istanbul a few weeks ago and I couldn’t believe how incredible it was that we could be there (before we all caught a virus (…covid?) that knocked us out for two weeks and sadly made us cancel shows in Bucharest and Aarhus...). The month before we toured down through France, to Spain and then Portugal and then back up through the Basque Country and up to France again before coming home. I like how everywhere you go, you get to see the ways people think and feel and act in sometimes subtly and sometimes almost hilariously different ways. You can feel it in the audiences, walking through the streets of a new place, sitting in a cafe, in the clothes people wear and the food and the bars and the buildings and the art and the conversations after shows and with the person driving you to the airport. I have been loving taking it all in. Thanks to all of you who have been there.

This week we head out again to Germany and Switzerland, and next week to France, Italy and Spain. As my friend and bandmate Dan says, it’s a charmed existence. More thoughts soon xx

at the hagia sofia in istanbul

backstage in athens

motorway rainbow