Guitar Porn Frenzy

Hokay … Some of my more venerable Blogville neighbours can skip this post as it is primarily for Jacques-Arthur and any recent neighbours who may not have inhaled the heady, if noxious vapours from the fœtid and unsavoury depths of my archives.

It is just guitar porn and also a load of links to me actually playing guitar rather than just dicking around like in yesterday's post.
Sheesh! What a mess that was!

Katie has twisted my arm to post the other two videos I took yesterday morning so those will be coming in the next week or two.
Suffer!
They are truly awful.

Before we get on to the guitar porn, here are a few tracks where I play some much better guitar than on the video.
If anyone is fool enough to want any more, there are lots more under the "Let's Make A Racket" label, but you'll have to scroll back a few pages.

First up is "Cold. Cold Feeling".



This is one of my favourite tracks; just a simple, slow blues, played on my Strat.
Nothing fancy, just long, heartfelt notes.
For once I actually managed to leave my ego at the door for this one (I have an annoying habit of playing a hundred notes where one would do, so this track is a rarity and all the nicer for it), though before the final solo you can just hear Paul yell at me to "Give it some sex!" which was his way of telling me to turn it up and go for it.
Hey ho.

Next up is my PRS (the one in the video).



This time I'm playing it properly, waltzing through cheesy old "Parisienne Walkway", live at the Connaught, back in 2000.



Here's Old Les (see the porn shots below for which guitar is which), widdling all over "Wild About You Baby" from a rehearsal at the Ethel Rump Memorial Hall (I kid you not).

Another Old Les track; this time standing in with the Dave Thomas Band on a completely unrehearsed amble through John Martyn's lovely "Ballad of an Elder Woman".



No flash, this time; just simple hippie fingerpicking and all the better for it.

An acoustic blues now, featuring my gorgeous Martin D-18 and recorded in my home studio with Michael on slide as part of our occasional delta blues duo "The Blind Willies".



This is Blind Willie McTell's beautiful "Mama, t'Aint Long 'Fore Day."

Finally, the infamous "Too Many Monkeys In My Tree", for more information about which, see the even more infamous "ponytail, goatee and pointy sideburns" post.



This is the song that gave birth to my current on-and-off project, "The Groovy Fuckers."

There are at least thirty-five tracks (I've lost count) hidden away in the nether regions of this blog if any of you wish to delve further.

Anyhoo:
Guitar porn …

Jacques-Arthur: these are some friends of mine who I hope you'll get to meet and play with one day.

First up is my main squeeze, a Paul Reed Smith custom built for me at the factory; serial number: PRS 44115.
It took six months of trying out various Private Stock guitars they shipped over to sort out the final spec. and another six months to hand build it, but it was well worth the wait.

The body is pre-CITES Brazilian mahogany with a thick, hand-carved Michigan big-leaf maple top in vintage cherry sunburst (machine routing tends to affect the sonic qualities of the wood; hand carving with violin-makers' finger-planes is much gentler, though inevitably obscenely expensive and only available as a special order).
The neck and fingerboard are pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood (I had A-B tested a Private Stock Brazilian Rosewood neck against an Indian rosewood neck and the Brazilian was so much more responsive; I had to have it even though it added another £1,700 to the total cost (which you don't want to know).
PRS has only got 250 pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood neck blocks and this is number 67, hence the signed and numbered back-plate.

Shit, this stuff is so BORING, but I'm a guitar nerd so please forgive me.
There's even more boring tech info on it here.

And here it is laying on my bed. Guitar porn.

Here it is again, in the studio with Phil's new Pearl Reference drum kit and another old friend, my 1984 Fender Flame Élite, truly a gorgeous guitar which I mostly use for jazz. It plays so sweetly.

And here is my beloved old custom Strat, which can be heard singing on the first of the tracks above (Cold, Cold Feeling).
This is a truly awesome stage guitar and has seen extremely heavy action over the decades.

It has Fender Lace Gold pickups and a Bartolini active circuit.
The first two of those lovely vintage Telecaster knobs do their usual job of volume and tone but the third one cranks in the active circuit so I can get infinite sustain and perfectly controlled harmonic feedback.
Cheaty, but cool!
The long note at the start of the second solo in Cold, Cold Feeling is this knob turned up to about "3". It's great for songs like Boston's "More Than A Feeling", where you need to hold notes for bloody ages, or shove it up to ten if you want to seriously party!
That sucker eats valves for breakfast, though, so I use it sparingly as new sets of Boogie bottles don't come cheap.

The guitar body is refinished in Lotus Sports Cars "Opalescent Pearl" paint (it was originally white). Phil bribed security with chocolate, sneaked it into the factory one night and used around £150 worth of paint on the job (don't tell anyone).
It looks beautiful under stage lights; all the gorgeous pearl colours wash over it as it moves.
It is finished with a hand-applied cellulose lacquer; hard to get these days outside of vintage car restorers but sonically so much better than the plastic crap they put on guitars nowadays.

The neck is a deep, round-profiled flame maple and the fingerboard is pretty-pretty birds-eye maple, cut to my favourite 21" Les Paul radius rather than the usual 17" Fender radius and fitted with Gibson fat frets.
The dot markers are abalone and get smaller as they go up the neck like my Martin D18; a more elegant solution than a normal Strat.

The switch below the middle knob cuts out the active circuit when I don't need it and a pull-switch incorporated into the same knob gives a cut in tone shaped to sound like Robert Cray (that dates the guitar for you).

The trem is a Kahler Flyer. They don't make those any more, which is a damned shame. Its a "cam" style trem rather than a pivot like the Floyd-Rose, so if I break a string it stays in tune so I can finish the song. It also means double and triple stop bends don't detune the upper strings like they do on a Floyd.
Combine that with a graphite nut and Sperzel Trim-loks and I can change a string mid song while still comping with my left hand.

Here is my delicious old Martin D-18, bought from Christian Martin IV himself while he was on tour here in 1977.
I use Gordon Giltrap Hand Wound strings on this and it sounds simply beautiful.

And of course, Old Les himself, my oldest and dearest friend and companion with whom I have shared my every secret since I was a kid.

A 1969 prototype Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, built from leftover '59 and '60 parts (the neck's a deep, round fifty-nine vintage) with those sweet mini-humbuckers added.
Way too valuable to gig with any more, I spent the price of a decent new car on the PRS to replace it on stage, though I still play it all the time at home.

So there you have it.
A boring, re-hashed post of some of my guitar porn for any archive-phobics among you.

Enjoy / Suffer (delete where applicable).

Unlistenable Cacophony

In a few weeks I shall be standing in for a vacationing John in Tony's band (four retired headmasters who gig as "The Four Heads" … Yay!) at Neil's daughter's wedding.

The band decided a rehearsal was in order.
I've no idea why; they are truly ireedeemably shambolic (in the best possible way) and rehearsal seems to have done them no good in the past, but hey, let's go with the flow.

So this morning we turned up at the studio and … er … "rehearsed" (has anybody noticed that the word "rehearse" has "arse" in it?).

This (the little video at the bottom of the post) was the full extent of the rehearsal for an old blues number.

Neil suggested let's try "Walking By Myself."
I asked "What key?"
He said "E." to which I said "E? I've only ever played it in G; oh, well, let's give it a go", and turned on the video camera.

Sheesh! What a shambles. Hee hee.

Luckily the camera is tilted at such an angle that you cannot see much except the ceiling and occasionally my ass (easily my best feature), and - thanks to it being propped between my amp and Tony's drums, the sound is so bad that Neil's vocals are lost in the cacophony … which is probably just as well … he'll do much better on the night.

This is Tony (yes, Phil; he's on one of the studio's kits).

And this is my guitar with Rob and Neil in the background.
We make the Rolling Stones look like a bunch of teenagers.

I just love the band's verdict at the end of this unlistenable mess:

"S'alright, innit?"

God help the poor wedding guests!
Hee hee.

Kids, be warned … This is what old people do when you let them off the leash. If you have old people in your family be sure and keep them locked up and sedated.

WTF Monday

Continuing the unnecessarily dick-obsessed direction this WTF Monday series seems to have taken …

English folk will be saying "Oooh! Pass the custard." but hopefully this may amuse or at least disgust those from other shores.

It is one of a series of photos Katie took in Sainsbury's, while marvelling at and mocking what passes as food in England.
You guys really don't want to see her photo of the meatballs!

Rest assured I shall be returning the favour when I get to the States next April and shall post the results.

What's Cooking With Dive? - Flapjacks

To be more specific: Mad Aunt Janet's Flapjacks.

All my life I have been hopelessly addicted to my Mad Aunt Janet's flapjacks.
She makes the best flapjacks in the world.
Bar none.
She is also quite, quite mad … as sane as a chocolate sunhat.

Her flapjacks, however, are syrupy perfection; slightly crispy at the edges and soft and moist and slightly gooey where it matters.

And it DOES matter!

So here - after much cajolery to obtain it - is my Holy Grail: Mad Aunt Janet's very own recipe (she even laminated the card she printed it on, bless her mad and twitching little cotton socks) for you to try at home.

I must confess, my first flapjacks didn't come out quite as perfectly as hers invariably do, but they were pretty bloody good notwithstanding.
And with practice they are getting better …

Now get your pinnies on and join me in the kitchen where we'll cook up an oaty orgasm.

Here are your ingredients.
Here also - if you click on the photo to enlarge it - is Mad Aunt Janet's precious recipe.

Today we will need:

- A quarter of a pound of good, organic, unsalted Irish butter;

- Three ounces of Lyle's Golden Syrup (and ONLY Lyle's! It is the elixir of the Gods - accept NO substitute).

- Three ounces of soft, brown sugar (organic and fairtrade, natch);

- Half a pound of organic rolled oats.

Some people use honey in flapjacks but those aren't flapjacks, those are oaty, honey-ish thingummyjigs.
Besides; once you've tried Lyle's you'll never go back.
Believe me.
Katie was concerned that the stuff would be unavailable in the US, but yay for Cynthia who tracked some down for her (in a squeezy tube, no less).
So no excuses, Yanquis! Lyle's it must be!

Anyhoo … Let's get cooking.

Put your butter and your golden syrup and your soft brown sugar in a saucepan and stand it over the lowest heat your hob will allow.
Boy howdy, this looks healthy!
Don't stir it yet; just let it sit there and slooooowly melt together while you measure out the oats.

Yay, oats!

You'll also want an eight by eight inch baking tin; nothing too thick or it will take too long to cool down and you'll end up with hard flapjacks.
Smear lots more butter all around the tin, then enjoy sucking your fingers clean.
Mmmmm … buttery goodness.

Right! Back to the pan!
You can start stirring it gently now until the sugar and syrup and butter become one in a slinky, sexual way that's pretty irresistible to watch …
… or maybe that's just me …

Then you can start ladling in the oats and stirring them around.
Pretty, huh?
Can you just feel the pain you're going to have to suffer in the gym for eating this lot?

When all the oats are in there, continue stirring (still over the lowest, gentlest heat possible) until every last oat is smothered in sticky-sweet goodness.

Plop that lot out into your buttered baking tin and then get in there with your fingers and smooth it all down.
Don't press it down too firmly though; we want gooey flapjacks, not hard biscuits.
Watch out, because it's pretty darned hot, but fingers are so much better than a spoon or a knife for this; plus you can lick 'em clean after. Woohoo!

Slap that tin right into the middle of your oven, which of course you will have pre-heated to 350º or gas mark 4 (or - as we discovered when Katie bought me an oven thermometer - gas mark three and a third for my own knackered old oven).

You want to leave it in there for thirty minutes.

When it comes out it should look like this.
Mmmmmmmmm … Toasty!

Leave the tin on a cooling rack for five minutes or so and then score some lines in the still-soft mixture so that the flapjacks will peel apart when they come out.

Then GO AWAY!

Do NOT try to get these suckers out while they're still warm because they need to set firm.
You might THINK they're ready, because they set from the top down, but believe me; these things are tricksy little buggers
Try to get one out early and you just end up with a mess of sticky goo all over you.
Thus speaks the greedy voice of experience.
Hearken!

Don't come back until MUCH later, when they're properly cooled.
Then and only then can you take 'em out.

They should be just a little crispy around the edges and gooey but firm everywhere else.
If they're hard then what you've made is not flapjacks but "Crispy Oat Biscuits".
If they're all runny, then you need a slap upside the head.

Use the next few minutes wisely.
Brew up a perfect pot of tea and then arrange a couple of the flapjacks on a plate.
Perhaps some flowers from the garden in a vase on the table …

When your tea is cool enough to drink, take a sip and let the flavour infuse in your mouth.
Then bite into a flapjack …

If your mouth doesn't orgasm then you have probably been dead for some time.

Be sure to lock away the rest of the flapjacks, because you will need the iron willpower of the truly deranged if you're not going to just leap on them and eat the lot all in one sitting.

My effusive gratitude flows, syrup-like in the direction of Mad Aunt Janet.

Enjoy!

Oh, And Talking About Dicks …

The day has arrived!

Men are no longer necessary.
Lesbians can take over the world at last.

Go for it, girls!

WTF Monday

Sheesh!

I was then on my way up to bed and I realised I had forgotten it is WTF Monday!


This one's for Neetzy, who wants to come over to England and work as a dick …
er … you'll have to dig around in her comments boxes to clear that one up.

Seems they had their own guild and everything. A steady, respectable career. Yay!

Katie took this one; it's an old stained glass panel in Dragon Hall.

Poems From The Battlefield

Wow! That was quick!
On Wednesday I ordered a copy of Katherine's new book from her publisher. They told me it would take a while as each book is printed to order so I expected a longish wait.
This morning (Saturday) the postie handed me my copy, hot off the presses in the USA and here in my hand three days after I placed the order.
I'm impressed!

But never mind the publisher's efficiency, what about the book itself?

You all should know by now that I am a huge fan of our Katherine's poetry.
If any of you have not yet had the pleasure of reading any, click HERE to see just a tiny example.

I know it's a bit of a cliché but she is the real thing.
My lovely new book now nestles amidst my very favourite poetry books and fully deserves its place there.

I was going to do a little review of it, but I know I'd just get embarrassingly gushy and suck my thesaurus dry of superlatives, so instead, here are a few pictures to give an impression of how beautiful the book is.
I strongly recommend you buy a copy yourself and do your own review.

Katherine lives close to the Manassas Battlefield Park and walks both there and in Bull Run Regional Park, taking beautiful photos which can be seen on her blogs, and gathering inspiration for her poems.

The book is an amalgam of photographs - both period and contemporary - quotations and poems and is as much a meditation on life and the nature of good and evil as it is an historical record.

From the reflective and beautiful to the shattering and heartrending, Katherine's poems affect me deeply and hopefully they will do the same for you.

I shall treasure this book and return to it again and again for inspiration and reassurance.

Thank you, Katherine. You totally rule! Your book is all that I expected and more … absolutely wonderful.

Now the rest of you can go buy it from Katherine's store (click here).

Another Year Gone

Sheesh! Time flies.
Yesterday evening saw the very last Japanese class of the academic year.
Sigh …
No more college until September.
I miss it already.
Hey ho.

Here's the sunset over Breydon Water that I took coming home from class last night at getting on for half nine.

2012 Here We Come

Just in case any of you are remotely interested, as I was jammed up against the door of the train on my way home earlier this week I decided to grab my camera and take a few photos of the site for the 2012 Olympics.

Yes, they are actually building stuff at last, having left it totally derelict for years while they argued over money.
Inevitably, all the promises of private investors have turned out to be the lies and fantasies we always suspected and they have run away screaming so it's down to us long-suffering taxpayers to bail out the event, which shall now be more along the lines of a local village sports day than the spectacular celebrations of the past.

Here's what we've been paying for so far:

Most of the site - as you can see - is still pretty much of a wasteland …

But the actual Olympic stadium itself is now well under way.
This is partly financed by a football team in the US who is going to ship most of it over the pond after the Olympics, and we are truly grateful to them as otherwise we'd have been using the local dog track.

And here is Zaha Hadid's splendid swimming pool building.
This is the only part of the original grand scheme still being built, and that's only because she is so ornery and shouty and the government is shit-scared of her.
Yay, Zaha! She's awesome!

I'll keep you posted as the work goes on.

Cuff Him, Pincher!

I love my local Plod …

For any Colonials who may not know, "Plod" is a generic term for the police over here - named after the impressively dopey P.C.Plod in the childrens' classic, Noddy.

Quite apart from the fact that my local Plod - based in the nearby village of Acle - have the most awesome pursuit cars (they are the only force in the country to have had the Lotus Esprit Turbo V8 supercar decked out in Plod colours … yay!), their chief also comes equipped with the most splendidly appropriate name.

This is from the newsletter they send round the villages and which plopped fortuitously onto my doormat:

If you're thinking of turning to a life of crime in my part of Norfolk, you're going to get pinched by the Plod, and who better to pinch you than our own crusading crime-buster, Inspector … er … Pincher?

Though "Our area remains to be a safe place to live … ?"
Did you get that translated from the Chinese by Babelfish?
Sheesh!
You may have a great name but please learn our language.

That's a magnificent moustache, Inspector!

And if he's not around, watch out for his deputy!

Hoorah for the marvellously monickered Messrs. Pincher and Cuff.
With names like that, what else could they be but policemen?