General Eye-Zing's Blog

The Unreliable Rantings of a Blethering Idiot

2015 Into the known 

 

I have plans... all the time. And they take time … too much time sometimes. But I finish what I start ... Whatever the cost... And that is The Bitter Springs
Winter health is always a pain … you can stick it where the sun don’t shine
 
The Album is now finished and will be called CUTTLEFISH & LOVE’S REMAINS
Just the sleeve and the fine tuning
Here’s the track listing
 
1. Poetry Emulsion
2. Shanks’s Night Mare
3. The Hounslow Solicitors
4. Portrait of a Marriage
5. Our world was built on broken promises
6. Something Good Together
 
7. Cut All Fish
 
8. Its Yer Birthday
9. The Anonymous Touch*
10. Not Now Mummy’s jogging dear
11. Some Muthas Do Ave Em
12. Only Sour Grapes Are Free
13. Po Reprise
    14. Lost Contact
 
Prior to its release we will have a limited Double a side 7 inch single coming out on the Spanish label Acuarela Records featuring 2 of the LP tracks SOMETHING GOOD TOGETHER C/W PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE
The single has a brilliant sleeve designed by Inga Tillere
THE HOUNSLOW SOLICITORS will a 3 or 4 version download to coincide with CUTTLEFISH’S release
 
I grew up in Beards Hill Close Hampton … named after this man … an excellent singer in his day apparently … I now deliver to my old house … looking up at my old bedroom window I’m taken back
I’m playing guitar and there’s a tap on the window ‘’ wow you sound like Lou Reed do you need a drummer?’’
2015 (years and months mean nothing to me never have done)
So I do what I always do
Write a song about it

John Beard sang
 
John Beard sang
But not a John Beard song
Then I came along and took the baton on

The timbre of the lawns and the cedars by the Library
Where they cherry pick the books for the films and for TV
I’m devouring the magic of Asterix and Tin Tin
While ideas for songs in my head are beginning
And a tenor is ringing down the years

John Beard sang
But not a John Beard song
Then I came along and took the baton on

Murderous pillaging mini cab drivers
It’s a parallel history of Ketchup in the morgue
And language of TV catchphrase and part time gypsy
I would never be accused
 had they ever troubled to know me
Circumstantial at best
never Burning down the Library

John Beard sang
But not a John Beard song
Then I came along and took the baton on

Worst holiday ever with the Bethany chapel
Porridge was nice and a crush on a welsh boy
Cried to come home and a cold swimming gala
Homecoming joy then I lost half my family

Later in the garage me Kim and Dan
Then Steve at the window and we were a band
  
John Beard sang
A George Frederic Handel song
Loud and strong until his hearing was gone
 
My favourite tree in Hampton .. reminds me of a woolly Mammoth or something from Bored of the Rings maybe,
you need to stand before it to get the full effect ... Hill House drive .. I think it's alive ..or a Dinosaur Jr cover


Our 1st gig in 2015 was part of a Pennyblack music night in London with the ever excellent Band of Holy Joy (watch out for their brilliant new song Crass Harry) and the rather good Idiot Son we performed a set that took 3 months to get together and 45 minutes to play ... too much importance rests on so few shows ...makes them hard to enjoy and appreciate fully
But we always do our best to be different every time .. we were very pleased to have Jack Hayter join us on pedal steel ... I promised not to talk much in the set, but a mixture of onstage nerves' anxiety and the old self doubt once again turned me into a bit of a clown
Big thanks to John, Dominic and the Pennyblack team for asking us to play

Bitter Springs Live at the Macbeth in Hoxton ... Friday 9th of January
L to R Nick Brown ,Simon Rivers ' Jack Hayter (the hat)

No ... this is my favourite tree in Hampton
Gerald Scarf built this tree out of Pink Floyd's inter band resentments (Hemming close)

The next confirmed Springs show is a headline set at the Albert in Brighton
on Saturday April 25th with our very good friends ASBO DEREK
tickets from resident records or contact Asbo Derek through face book

Simon


 

Headlands Hotel Song 

HEADLANDS HOTEL


This was one aspect of the view from our cottage in Cornwall
Just finished the song it inspired Headlands Hotel
It's set to a chug along roadrunner ( J. Richman) style tune
Originally it was going to be a ghost story type song
You know the old abandoned haunted building tale
But that idea didn't go very far
So i've included a few incidents from the holiday
We may never get around to recording it
Because of a long backlog unrecorded stuff
But maybe putting things on here will help to remind me later

Ghosts of the cacophony on Port Hampton 


I never used to think this way but now I say
' Don't waste the day light indoors'



Took our bikes down memory lane
Through the strange landscape of Hampton's waterboard
Crossed the bridge to Platts Eyot/Port Hampton
The wooden slats now old and worn
I remember when they were new replacing the old and worn ones



Dan and Neil would drive the forklift over with our instruments drums and amps
And me and Kim would make sure nothing fell off in the divets bumps and ramps
Sometimes we used the boat that was more exciting



The top of the Island was not our domain
We were down the bottom end with the factories and the boats
Dan Neil and me all worked on the island
In the medieval conditions of the 1980's
Filling our lungs with plastic moulding powder and toxic fumes
And our stomaches with tea and pot noodles



One boiling hot summer we swam to molsey and back in our lunch break
Holiday barges would fill up with fuel and food at Brian De La Hunty's
Now the rats as big as small dogs scamper from behind the old pumps
With no one to frighten anymore



There's a Cornish crab canning place at the top now
And a couple of recording studio's
But the real musical history of this Island was ours
Free from those airless tombs known as rehearsal studios
Upstairs in S.B.Westons
The Bitter Springs/The Last Party
In this room...behind this window



For 15 odd years Tuesday nights was practice night
Arguments over who's turn it was to make the tea ( Dan never would)
Kim me and Dan all gave up smoking at once but Neil wouldn't
Every song was played as though it would be the last
And Our unschooled sounds
Competing only with the injection moulding machines and the night shift's radio



Hard as we tried in those sterile nerve wracked studio enviroments
Our greatest moments were here
Shared with angry boat builders ' swooping bats ' giant rats and the tired night shift
Our glorious cacophony drifting over the water to Molsey
Did they hear what we could hear ...probably not



Songs came together..fell apart .. came together again
Chrismas no1 being one that clicked instantly ..the greatest feeling when that would happen
Brilliant songs forgotten ..overlooked
The never made 3rd Last Party Album is embedded in those walls still
we were loud ...so loud ... I have 2 hearing aids now
My ears are still ringing and they always will
With The Ghosts of the cacophony on Port Hampton



With no human opposition
That tough old bag ... Mother nature
Claws her way through the concrete and man made structures
So who'll remember old Charlie
Who Even once he'd retired
Would walk all the way from Hampton Hill to bring the milk and papers over every day



And who'll Remember his catch phrase ?
' Ere where's your mate? ...  ' No not him the other one'





Maybe  

I'm sure I must have thoughts which don't become songs ...  but ...
I've recently got round to reading the Neil Young biography Shakey by Jimmy McDonough
In which the song Maybe by the Chantels gets mentioned.

Now a long time back I'd had an idea for a doo wop style tune also called Maybe
  I had scrawled a couple of lines on the back of another song in one of my folders
which I returned to a few months ago and finished with authentic middle 8 and moody girl group style lyrics, the whole thing,
I remember thinking yeah this'll make a great track for me to sing..then I put in the Back Burner file (yeah that's what it's called)
and went on to another idea.
So when I read of the Chantels/Maybe in the Shakey book I felt a strong dose of Deja vu and I thought hang on you dope
better check this Chantel's track out ....
and yeah you guessed it ... exactly the same .
Ah.... Now I remember I'd heard the song, tried to work out the chords ..wrote the title and the 1st verse down, and forgot about it
so when i returned to it a year or so later I had no idea where it had come from, only the vague idea of it being in a doo wop style,
funny thing is the lyrics I made up myself and the middle 8 chords are almost the same as the Chantels.

So Thanks to the Neil Young biog ...for saving any future embarrassment I might encounter when trying to pass the song off as one of mine
Don't tell anyone will you?
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ONE LUNG HO 

 
My lyric file folders have always been too big and cumbersome and Kim always says to keep them small and manageable,
but being the lazy computer phobe I am I just keep writing on the same one until it all ends in disaster.
The 4 only slightly different versions I now have of THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE (779KB 79 Pages) being a perfect case in point.
So in honour of my third Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) I have reluctantly opened a new file called ONE LUNG HO (these are jokes for myself therefore don't need to be funny)
and the 1st song to be on it is a re-written unreleased LAST PARTY tune called TODAY I MET THE MOTHER ... back to the future eh
 
Unknown Lungs

It's Jesus In The Water Tank 



I'd been looking at this for a while but not really seeing it then I noticed what was written on the side and the song title came in an instant and the song wrote itself (almost). Thought about the film dark water so it gets a mention and you know how hard it is for people to take the church seriously these days?  Well...what if Jesus got in the tank and then 'the blood, the guts, the nuts, the flesh of christ' ...'go racing to the taps down blessed pipes'

'Real Holy water of love, poured down from up above'... 'by Jesus in the water tank' - The opposite of poisoning? ..well no ... it is poisoning... he's converting illegally.

Still all's fair in religion and athletics as long as you don't win or get caught ...... 'And he won't be getting bored' ... 'he's doing air guitar all day to my sweet lord'.

think 'a little bit me a little bit you' as done by the the black lips and Lookout for the Springs recorded version some time in 2020