Searching for some doom and gloom!

>>> It’s been just a few short months since I made the move to the ‘big smoke’ and set up home in a rather trendy area of South London. On first look it seemed like a great place to live with plenty of good bars and restaurants, a large green space and many of my friends close-by. And indeed I have found myself a nice lifestyle in this pleasant area but there is one significant problem. Try as I might, I’m struggling to find any decent regular live music within walking distance of my flat.

I work in a somewhat run down area of North London and in contrast, each week I see a plethora of guitar wielding musicians walking down the High Road and have noted a fine choice of bars with regular music evenings advertised on their windows and sandwich boards. From Camden to Brixton, throughout the decades, it has been the economically weaker areas of the city which have often produced the greatest creativity.

Ted Hughes once said that “Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist.” If this is true then perhaps I have moved to the wrong area of town for hard-knocks. Looking into the history of an array of greats and lates of the folk and acoustic music scene it would appear that Hughes’ analysis is on the mark. Woody Guthrie’s childhood was plagued with tragedy with his sister and father dying in fires and his mentally-ill mother committed to an asylum. Joni Mitchell dropped out of college pregnant at the tender age of twenty before heart wrenchingly giving up the baby for adoption and Bob Dylan had a humble childhood in a Minnesota mining town with his immigrant parents, leaving home abruptly at eighteen. Most of my modern day acoustic heroes show no hope of breaking this tradition of doom and gloom with Damien Rice, another college drop out, forced to leave home by disappointed parents and the melancholy Ray Lamontagne’s poverty stricken childhood with a violent father and mother who moved him from pillar to post.

As a writer, I’ve had my fair share of creative melodrama. Call me a heathen, but right now I’m quite content to live happily amongst the trendy young things. But at least I have finally found an acoustic night in the listings for next week and it is a night which I have high hopes for – walking distance, well no, but it’s only a bus ride away!


>>> I was at my in-laws the other day when I heard the dull-sweet sound of Cat Stevens coming from my mum-in-law’s study. At least it sounded like Cat Stevens but I didn’t recognise the song. It was, of course, Yusuf Islam and his album ‘An Other Cup’. After converting to Islam at the height of his fame, back in 1977, Cat, now called Yusuf, waited nearly 30 years to release another ‘pop’ album back in 2006. Don’t think I’m out of touch, I realise the album was released nearly two years ago and at the time I followed Yusuf’s return to the music scene with excitement but for one reason or another, I just never got round to buying the album. Listening to it now for the first time I must say that in 30 years his style hasn’t changed much (apart from the odd references to Islam) but what I can say it that it is a most welcome return.