Tag: 2022/10/05

Day 24

Monday March 15, 2021

Mark:

Sarah doesn’t have a fridge. She’s vegan and doesn’t use conventional milk so doesn’t really have things around that can go off. Cooking, for her, is mostly a big pan of vegetables and beans and things that just sits there on the stove for whenever she wants it. She’s shared it with us, and told us to help ourselves to it whenever we want, and it really is very good. In fact, this is kind of how the whole experience here is developing. Food is just there for anyone to help themselves to whenever they want. Actually, just about anything is. It really is developing into a kind of communal living right down to the three of us all now feeling comfortable enough to walk round the place naked at times. This very much is not the conventional house sharing situation. Even down to just pretty much wandering into each others’ bedrooms for casual chats. Privacy is very much respected, but if we’re in the ordinary run of the day, whatever passes for ordinary around here, it’s totally fine to wander into any room at any time with or without clothes on.

Fridge. Oh yes. I was talking about the fridge, or non existence of one. Well, me and Maja have decided we would very much like the existence of one. In London, many people, if they can help it, don’t throw anything away. All kinds of items either get put out on the street for people to come and help themselves, even sometimes with electrical items having helpful labels like, ‘This works,’ stuck to them. When we were arranging our room here, there was a big black, kinda broken couch in it that didn’t quite fit the room or anywhere else in the apartment so we put it out on the street. The next day it was gone. A ridiculous amount of furniture and kitchenware in our old house came from the street. Apart from street donating and scavenging, there are also websites where people will post stuff for sale, or also often for free if you can pick it up. I’ve registered with one of these to see what we can get, and yes, I did do it with the hope of seeing a free fridge. That crazy idea stops being crazy today when we do indeed see a free fridge on offer. We make the call and it’s still available and we can pick it up tomorrow.

Day 25

Tuesday March 16, 2021

Mark:

The lady who has the fridge is called Marcella and she lives in Holloway, two to three kilometres away from us. We’ve talked about hiring a car for the job, but I have another ridiculous idea which is that we can take the trolley I’ve used to carry amps all over London in what now feels like another life, and put a fridge on it and wheel it all the way back home. Will this work? I have no idea. We’ve decided to get there, see if the trolley thing works, and if it doesn’t, see what we can to sort out some kind of hired transport from there. We’ve figured that even if we pay up to 50 quid or more for a hire car, or man with a van or whatever, it will still be a lot cheaper than buying a new fridge, which is what we’re basically getting here for free. 

We get to Marcella’s house and she’s delighted to see us, to see that the fridge is going to some people who need and will really appreciate it. We’re also helping her out because she had no idea how to dispose of a fridge. Why it’s being disposed of we don’t quite get to the bottom of, but that’s none of our business. Marcella is lovely and wants to give this thing to us, well, somebody but that somebody has turned out to be us, and we are gratefully receiving. But this is not a little thing. It’s a full on fridge freezer, one of those things that’s taller than the average person. Incredibly, we discover the trolley can take it. Which means that now we’re about to set off and wheel a person sized fridge through a few London neighbourhoods and down Holloway High Street, all the way back home. This means going very slowly with me pushing the thing, totally blind to where I’m going while Maja walks in front, gently guiding me left and right as obstacles appear. The most notable of these is a full sheltered bus stop full of people right in the middle of a London high street that we slowly, and quite literally, have to negotiate our way through. Oh, for a photograph of that. Then, when we do finally make it all the way home, we have to carry it up two flights of stairs. Oh, that is fun. Then, once in the apartment – what a lovely triumphant moment that is – it’s back on the trolley with it for the final leg of wheeling it into the main room to place it lovingly in the corner where it quietly and joyously hums away. Sarah can’t believe it when she comes home and marvels at our resourcefulness, effort and determination at even being able to find such a thing in the first place, and then the sheer force and energy required to get it all the way here. The next day, in something of a celebration, I write a set of lyrics commemorating the event, called Marcella’s Fridge. I really hope we can do something with it one day.

And this really is what we do now. Live life and write about it. In here and in our songs. Or, at least in our lyrics which we fully intend to turn into songs when we finally get the time and space to sit down and really look at full on songwriting. We keep thinking we’re going to get to that, but then something else happens that demands our attention. Songwriting. It really is the thing that happens when you have nothing else to do. For whatever reason that is. Yes, I know, there is the avoidance issue that even some of the most successful have. Sting says he avoids it like the plague and even Paul Simon says it’s never fun. For us, at least as far as lyrics are concerned, we write write write all the time. We’ve taken the David Bowie approach of just writing everything down. All of us, we’re surrounded and blessed by genius. We just don’t write it down enough. Think about it. You don’t sit down at your kitchen table and think, ‘I’m going to think of something devastatingly funny now.’ No. It just happens when you’re with your friends. The same goes for genius observations, and just comments in general. And of course it’s not just what you say, but what your friends say and also what you overhear in the world around you. All. The. Time. But it all gets lost to the ether. Well, we’re going round and trying to gather some of that ether up. Or at least catch it before it becomes so. For this, we have pens scattered all around the apartment and we take notebooks everywhere we go. A conversation on a bus, a daytrip, and chance encounter, an image of London. It all goes in. And what doesn’t I know will stay with us to emerge at some later time. This has led to some bizarre situations. Meeting friends in the street while one of us is walking along head deep in a notebook writing. And in supermarkets while one of us has continued shopping while the other stands deep in thought in the middle of an aisle. Clean up in aisle five? For us it’s write up in aisle six. Just a few sheets of paper and our writing sticks. It’s all we need. Never in my life have I seen notebooks fill up with lyrics as fast as ours have been in the past three weeks or so.

But here’s the other thing. As a songwriter past, I have written plenty of lyrics as pieces on their own, with a thought to using them later but very very few of those pieces see the light of day as actual songs. By this I don’t mean that I don’t try. I do, it’s just that while I usually think it will be an easy, almost lazy thing to do to just put some chord together and sing what I’ve written over them, I almost always end up writing whole new lyrics to what I’m coming up with melodically and rhythmically. But it’s still great of course to have all these lyrics as a resource, and just great that we’re writing full stop. Even the concepts of them, and individual lines, of which I’m certain there are many great ones. Which is another thing. Apart from whole sets of lyrics in those books, we also have individual lines from things we’ve said or heard, and sometimes simply just concepts. As for what we’ll end up doing with them, who knows what Maja’s approach to actual songwriting will be when we get there? And I’m sure I can have a go at some of these, or maybe at least be able to incorporate what we have. But even then, I do write a song and come up with a whole new set of lyrics, well, the well will have been left untouched and its levels will remain constant. Absolutely no harm there.

Maja:

We’re finally off for a little outing. Since it’s deep into covid times, London is in lockdown and meeting people is not really that common. You can’t really go into a bar or anything, so we decide to meet up in Camden and have a couple of beers by the riverside. It’s fun to get to meet Matt, he is a very lively person with a ton of positive energy bottled up in his chest. As we stand in the winter cold, cheeks bitten by the wind, I get to hear a ton of lovely stories. About a city that was once alive. A town that was bursting with musicians, tourists, and the people that used to make out the, until recently, music capital of the world. The city I missed. And my heart hurts knowing it will never be the same again, so I will never get to experience it. The before Brexit and before Covid London. 

But I am happy to hear the stories from the people who were there. By the musicians that made up the tourist attractions that people would travel to see. To hear about playing at the Blues Kitchen, Ain’t Nothin’ But… and of course the 100 hour jam. Who gets to hear that? 

That’s what I think while I let these talkative guys go on and on. Sipping my drink. Enjoying the atmosphere. Of the empty canal next to Camden Market. Where it’s never empty.

Day 26

Wednesday March 17, 2021

Maja:

I’m woken up by Sarah entering our room in some state of lovely excitement, bringing me a present. When she woke up that morning, she was a bit chilly, so she got dressed in a jumper. That jumper is an official Gorillaz jumper from their tour a couple of years ago, which lead singer Damon Albarn personally gave out to only musicians and crew. The character on the jumper is Murdoc, the Gorillaz bassist. I’m beyond happy about it. What a way to wake up. 

Gorillaz is the band I’ve been listening to the most this last year, so it’s very fitting. And of course, Murdoc. The bassist. Of course, I play the bass, and Mark is my bass mentor, so what could be more fitting?

Mark:

After a wonderful morning, we’re hit again by reality in the evening as we sit down to really go through visa possibilities for Maja so that she can stay in London. All it pulls up is despair, despair, and despair. The two options we seem to have are by marriage, or something called the global talent plan. We spend three hours forensically going through both, and whenever we feel we can overcome one obstacle in the scores of requirements, we come to another which cannot possibly be met. The whole thing is just looking totally impossible. In fact, we conclude that both routes are deliberately written to set people up to fail. One piece of information in particular that keeps coming up is the need for a sponsor, with no clue at all as to what would constitute as a sponsor, no matter how much we research it.

The marriage road looks like this. 

Maja has a six month visa as it stands right now. She has been here just about a month.

We discover you have to formally announce an intention to marry, and then can’t get married for at least 70 days after that. If we do this tomorrow, that would take us more than three months into the six. But you also have to have a venue booked so even in this hypothetical scenario, that will probably not happen tomorrow. Especially not when you throw Corona regulations into the mix.

Once married, you can apply. 

The application process takes up to two months to receive a reply. That’s five months right there. Oh, and before any of this can even begin, Maja first needs to get a divorce which also has to go through the courts which will take at least another month. If it begins today, which it won’t. So there’s your six months. Minimum. And it’s not even a given that a visa would be granted on those grounds even if we managed to jump through all the hoops and tick all the boxes within the available time.

In a moment of clarity, we decide to solve the Visa problem by deciding we’re not going to depend on it. We’re going to do this by simply not living in the UK. With that we start to look at countries where it’s easier for Europeans to go and live. This leads us to seriously consider a few countries in Asia, South America, to be left for us to look at more closely another day.  

As we’re discuss this and I’m considering an option or two, Maja suddenly stops me cold. ‘Oh, I have an idea,’ she says breathlessly, wild excitement in her eyes. Oh wow. This sounds like it could be something. I exit my train of thought instantly. We’re in a desperate state here and her entire expectant face tells me she’s just about to unleash the magic thunderball that will blast the whole thing wide open. I take a mental step back to allow full space for whatever she is about to say to wash and crash right into. She hits me with it. ‘Will you go traveling in a camper van with me.’ Wow. I didn’t see that coming. But I don’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’ ‘Wow,’ she giggles. ‘That’s a bigger commitment than agreeing to get married.’ Yeah. I guess it really is.

Maja:

I’ve been thinking about camper vans for a long time. As a way to travel around and still keeping my life with me. So why not now? Mark can be in Europe for 180 days a year and I can be in UK for 180 days as well. So we can travel and live that way together. We just can’t work that way, but that is a different problem. Maybe we can solve that in some other way. Only this way, we can stay together. I hope. That’s really everything that matters to me right now.

Mark:

Instantly this has become our fallback option and we’ve now decided not to let the visa thing stress us out at all. If it happens it happens. And even if some circumstances arise which miraculously facilitate a visa solution, we might just follow through with all this anyway. Because, as we talk more and more about it, the whole thing starts to make more and more sense. Almost seamlessly the conversation coalesces into an actual plan for what we really want to do now and what we are now going to do – write songs, tour internationally with them, and write about it.

So far since we met we’ve spoken about kids and marriage. We’ve moved house together. And now we’re committing ourselves to working together as internationally touring, diary writing musicians and songwriters. Can I please remind you, we first physically met less than four weeks ago.

Day 27

Thursday March 18, 2021

Mark:

We tend not to talk about Sarah related stuff in the apartment, good or bad. Today while we’re out and about, we agree that while we love the touring idea, we’re not just going to look at upping and leaving as soon as we can. We’ve been given this opportunity of our own apartment based on Sarah needing someone in it and to take off anytime in the next few weeks would be a bit of a betrayal of that. And besides, should the visa situation be sorted, it would be no hardship to stay here in London for a while. I kinda had the same thoughts when I first came to London with that office job Paul had got for me while I was still living in Madrid. The boss there really came through, giving me the job on Paul’s say so and on the strength of a one minute phone conversation with me. Although I was itching to dive into London’s music scene and really start my journey there, I decided to commit to that job for at least six months, maybe even a year, and maybe gently work myself into music at the same time. As it happened of course, it all fell apart after just two weeks which blew all my good will apart. As a friend said at the time, when the hurricane was still at its fiercest, that was the best thing that could have happened to me as it left me free to follow my London path. I had already begun to harbour such thoughts myself and did my best to agree, but damn it was hard to do so.

Maja:

So if I’m going to stay in London, I need a visa. And our lovely friend Sarah is very well connected so she decides to help me have a look at that. First things first, she asks me to write up a CV so she can send that to her lawyer friend so he can have a look on how to make this happen. I do and she has a look and she’s mighty impressed. She discovers now that I’m an engineer and not some kind of damsel in distress that she had imagined. She still sends it off to see if I could get a visa in some kind of way, but the reality is like this, I could get a visa. A working visa. 

So why don’t I just do that then? Honest answer, I am not ready to do that. I am going through a divorce and that has put tremendous pressure on me, so I don’t feel like I could do that right now. 

I might do that later, but also, if you take that route you get stuck in the same job with a lot of terms, and I might want to reduce the amount of time I work to get more time doing the things I value in life such as doing music. And with a working visa I would get stuck in the same squirrel wheel everyone is in, and I am right now dying to get out of. 

I might want to take a freelancing job for some money, or work half time or something else, but I don’t want to commit to working full time right now. I just can’t commit to that.

So for now, I continue to look for a situation to coexist with Mark. And Sarah, with her newfound knowledge of me not being a damsel in distress as she previously thought, is starting to change her attitude about me… 

Mark:

Sarah’s met a guy around the local area called Dee. She had him round the apartment a few days ago for a bit of a social and really liked his vibe and where he seemed to be going musically. He’s into production and rap and she thinks he could be a good fit for us, whatever ‘us’ means. So we settle on a rough rehearsal time – all times are rough around here, and around 6pm, all four of us are in the main room and ready to see what kinds of sounds we can make. Me and Maja have been rehearsing a little by this point and have worked out something of a system for jamming and this is our first chance to try it out. It works quite well and there really is something of a special vibe with the two of us playing together. Bass is all about feel, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. We settle on something simple with Maja playing single, steady root notes and me playing grooves and solos over them. Well, I’ve never had such a feeling playing over such a simple beat. All the emotion is in those single notes and I’m able to feed of that and produce some really great feeling grooves that have Dee moving all over the place and singing and rapping like it’s the most effortless thing in the world. This feeds back into what we’re doing and we hit a new level, which Dee takes up to move himself even more and so the cycle goes. As it builds and builds, Sarah starts to sing as well, so we have the two of them really going for it as me and Maja keep things burning here, with Maja holding the full bottom rhythm as I play off the two singers while keeping the groove going for them at the same time. As this continues, as the dual basses pump and rumble, the dancing starts and we feel the start of something really special coming together. We jam through a few more bits and pieces for twenty minutes or so and then stop to collect our thoughts. Sarah has seen enough. ‘This is serious,’ she declares. ‘The power and vibe of the four personalities in this room is just huge. This is on. We all look at each other and agree. Myself, Maja and Sarah already feel like we have a massive collective personality, like we could take on anything and Dee has just come and fitted right into that, while adding a whole new dimension of positivity. Apart from anything else, he loves the vibes and positivity given off by me and Maja, loves the whole feel of the two of us playing bass, and, as a particular fan of bass, really likes the way I play individually. There’s so much more that can be tried as well. This really looks set. ‘Guys, we’re doing this,’ says Sarah. Twice a week, maybe three times a week, in here for two hours at a time, no messing about. Yeah?’ We all look at each other and smile. Yes, it’s on. This is happening. On top of everything else, Maja is now in a band. But there’s more. A member of an international chart topping band has expressed an interest in joining us. But not just that. This is someone from one of Maja’s favourite bands. Sarah tells us about this, but warns us that if it happens, this person might well try to take it over as their project. We look at each other again. No. This is ours. Don’t care who it is, no thanks. Maja leads the charge on this. So now, not only is she in her first London band, she’s now also turned down the opportunity of working with someone from one of her favourite bands. This is all getting a bit surreal.

Day 28

Friday March 19, 2021

Late morning and we hear strange voices in the apartment. We don’t bother to go and see who it is, or what’s going on, but we don’t need to. After about ten minutes, we hear whoever it is leave, and then Sarah comes into our room, barely able to hold onto herself through the tears of laughter. ‘Guys, you’re not going to believe this,’ she says. ‘The neighbours downstairs have just had their ceiling fall in. It has to be because of the bass frequencies and the dancing from last night. We might just have to tone it down a little.

Day 30

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Maja:

I am new in England. I’ve never been to England before and in England they have their dishes they are very proud of. Such as the English roast dinner. So as a welcome, Sarah decides to cook one for us. Sarah loves to cook, but recently she hasn’t had that many reasons to cook living alone and being a vegetarian. So she offers to cook us dinner, a wonderful pork roast with crackling and roast goose fat potatoes. Brilliant, thankyou very much. 

Me and Mark go about our day, having a lovely walk, writing some lyrics, and time flies. As we return home Sarah greets us with the most lovely roast dinner, and it is amazing. Absolutely brilliant. Roast pork with a thick layer of crackling. Yorkshire puddings. The most amazing roast goose fat potatoes cooked from scratch, golden and crispy on the outside with the softest inside you can imagine of a potato. Of course served with roasted veggies and gravy. 

I would have loved to have share this meal with all three of us, but Sarah says that she’s so happy to have made it but would never eat something like this. But that we should enjoy it. So she leaves the apartment to hang with one of her guys and we are left alone. With this feast. It’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Me and Mark enjoy it fully and after we put things away, we go to sleep. Blissfully unaware of what will happen next.

When Sarah comes home, she can’t resist having some of those incredible duck fat roast potatoes that she had made, and it just doesn’t sit right with her. They just don’t fit with her new strict healthy living regime so she decides to fast for three days straight to set things right for herself. Not long before we came here, she’d also decided to stop smoking. Other things have gone too, and all good, but now on top of that she’s having a three day fast. It’s just too much. She is trying too hard. This just does something to her personality, making her fragile and unpredictable and ready to pick any argument even if you’re agreeing with her. There will still be moments of fun and togetherness, but all punctuated by too many down moments. This quickly marks the beginning of the end for us here, and no matter how much we try, things will never really be quite the same again.