Exausted and Screaming

4 days 18 hours and 27 mins

Not feeling too good today, I’m getting a bit worried that I am overdoing it in the lead up to my big day, Nov 1st. This is when I celebrate my 60th Birthday and it is supposedly the local release date for my kuJenga Society album and Christmas single. But whether I will have either in time, remains to be seen.
I have started on the download service and I have just received the mp3’s from my mastering engineer Nick, who continues to recover from pancreatitis, having given himself and everyone else, a fright when falling ill recently. I shall upload them today as apparently, they take ages to appear in the well-known download vendors like ITunes, Google Play and Spotify etc…

As I say, not feeling too good today and the thought of falling ill just before my 60th is too awful to contemplate. Completely unrelated, I have a check-up at the Doctors set for today, a product of coming to the age I will soon be. My birthday is 29th Oct (which is a crap Wednesday) so I am celebrating on Sat 1st Nov. 

I must be careful with myself.


Screaming

I feel so fortunate that I grew up while the Beatles were releasing records. I got to hear them when those songs were brand new, and not experiencing them as rock’s grand history as we all do now.
I can still remember listening to these tunes unfolding second by second, sparking things off in my head as my mind tried to anticipate where the melody would go next, and it never did, it went somewhere even better! None of us had the musical maps in our heads that we all have now. This was untrodden ground and I was a blank canvas they were painting on. They changed me forever, this is where my musical journey began and it would have been where it ended too, were it not for the fact that I have made my own music now, and it will be my songs that will play me out of this world at my funeral.

I feel so fortunate, some people grew up with the likes of Alvin Stardust or (substitute any name you like here) I didn't, I grew up with the real deal!

When John Lennon fell in love with Yoko, I didn't have a problem with her, I was intrigued, she dealt with ideas, I like ideas, I was comfortable with leftfield music too so, what was there not to like?

I consider the Plastic Ono Band’s ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s only looking for her hand in the snow) to be one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll records ever and was a pre-cursor for punk.

It was so IN YOUR FACE!

Anyway, the Newtown Neurotics were on stage at the Music Machine, London on the night Lennon was shot. We didn't know, we had no mobile internet and the grapevine only extended so far when you were out for the night. When I got home, I went straight to bed exhausted and inebriated.
In the morning, I got a call from my friend Martin Brown who brought me the news (he recently was the first to bring me the news of the sad death of Shane Rowe ex of the The Sods and for a moment, it felt that he had become the de facto messenger of the grim reaper, until I reminded myself that thirty four years had passed between the two incidences so that was hardly fair).

I was devastated, I felt the loss so keenly and yet I had never met him. This was a new feeling, it was almost like he was a family member but unlike that type of loss, you cannot ask for counselling for losing your favourite popstar. Get over it idiot, and get real.

And that’s what I tried to do, but he came to me in a dream that night, I was in Central Park and I saw John and Yoko so I went up to them and told them how sad I was about the news.Then John said to me, it was ok, he was fine, he had just moved on to the next stage of existence. He told me not to worry and I felt mightily relieved.

When I woke up, that relief melted away as I realised that it was not a vision, he had told me nothing, I was just reassuring myself via my sub-conscience. 

What could I do, how could I mourn?

I handled it in the only way I knew how,

I wrote a song, Screaming.