ADAM Masterson

The So So Glos have left us for New York, we had a tea party for them yesterday at the royal oak.  The cleaners have been in today and there’s a peace to the place tonight.

Playing a private party tomorrow (thurs 26th nov) at Cardinal Cafe 80 Victoria Street opposite Westminster Cathederal, will let you know how it goes.

Friday night I’m playing at the New Cross Inn in south London there’s a babble of bands playing and I’m gonna go on for a few songs around 10ish.

If you’re in the hood come by for a drink

Cheers

Adam

Went off to see a bunch of my mates play at Cable Street Studios, first up were Smokey Angle Shades, then the Wild Wolves followed by a band I hadn’t heard of called ‘Make Up’ formerly called ‘Cheka’.  Really good night.  I’m putting a bill together for a christmas party at the Boogaloo in Highgate, Monday Dec 21st.  I asked all three bands if they wanna join me I’ll keep you in the loop about this.

For the most part in jet lag land, wishing I was in private jet lag land.

Adam

I’m headed out to Newark airport. Been given The Big Pink’s ‘A Brief History Of Love’ and Florence and the machine’s ‘lungs’ to listen to on the plane. Saw Florence play at Bowery Ballroom here in Oct and liked. Been listening a lot to Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’. Heard it once when it came out, but put it on me I-tunes recently and find myself listening to it over and over. Love ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Reckoner’. Also been listening to Jay-Z ‘The Blueprint 3′.

First time I heard ‘Empire State Of Mind’ was in the back of a New York Taxi, it had just come out and the driver had it on. I asked him to turn it up and he cranked it to the top, we were driving from Brooklyn into the city cross the Williamsburg Bridge. Won’t forget it.

Never listened to much music on the plane. Was sat next to Matt Tong the drummer from Bloc Party. What a lovely bloke, we chatted for most of the flight. We got a bunch of mutual friends and had been introduced a few years ago at a Zutons gig in London.

Matt said he’d been living in Berlin since then and was now residing in Brooklyn, he’s off to asia but will be passing through London in a couple of weeks and we’re gonna hang out.

Got straight into things in London. Met up with my flat mates at the Old Blue Last in Old Street. The So So Glows were playing checked out there set. Turns out there staying with us at our place. There from Brooklyn so it was kinda home from home. We went back to the Royal Oak, at one point this weekend there were 17 people staying over, there’s only meant to be six of us. Royal Oaks starting to look like the set of the young ones.

Adam

My friend Anna Gabriel has directed a new music video for my song ‘Can’t Control Myself’. Really pleased. Anna’s done a great job. Our pals Tommy and Mary Kate came by. They loved the vid and are gonna feature it on their site ‘The Free Style Life’. Tommy went out and got us all a bottle of champagne to celebrate, it was my last night in town, so we went out on a high.

Went for drinks and eats round the corner on Ave C, my pal Joe Arthur text and said I should come over and see him at his studio before I split.

Next day, I bundled my stuff in my case, and me and Anna took a taxi out to Red Hook Brooklyn.

Red Hook’s an abandoned kind of place, industrial warehouses, a ship yard on the water, when me and Anna arrived we were dwarfed by the RMS Queen Mary 2, the last remaining transatlantic liner docks here and towers into the sky. This is where the mobster Joey Gallo the ‘jukebox gangster’ was born and operated, imortalised in that Bob Dylan masterpeice ‘Joey’ from the Desire album.

The sun reflected hard off the east river for my last day in New York. Joe came out to meet us and it was big hugs. He walked us through a mechanics yard into his place, I’ve been to a few spots that Joe’s lived now and there all like walking into his subconscious, all his painting looming at you from the walls, this ones like a bat cave where you wouldn’t know if it’s night or day.

Joe’s building his studio, his bedroom’s the live room, there’s a bath tub in the hall, and a vocal booth through one of the rooms.

Joe walked me an Anna into the control room and stuck on one of his tunes. Sounded great, real lush production I think he said he recorded it in the Catskill mountains with Garth Hudson from The Band. I asked him what the tune was called and he said ‘The Dream’s Still The Same But I’ve Changed’. He then stuck on something he’d written and recorded the night before, this time with programed drums and loops, me and Anna looked at each other when it come on and nodded… it was good. He said it was called ‘Horses’. It was inspiring seeing Joe in his home, his bunker, his recording studio, his record factory. I’ll take this thought back to London.

We went out for Coffee nearby. Joe had come to my last show at Googies Lounge, we spoke about the gig and Joe had some kind things to say, said he couldn’t understand why I don’t have a record out.  Joe’s a believer and I love him for that.

I had a flight to catch from Newark airport and Joe drove us back into the city.  He played another record he made earlier in the year and it blew me away.  The first tune he played was ‘Boogie Christ’ or ‘The Ballad Of Boogie Christ’, he’s talking about making the Album into a film with Anna so watch this space.  The next tune was called something like ‘come on the revolution’, a really long piece- musically it put me in mind of Dylan’s ‘Hard rains a gonna fall’.  I’d like to listen to the music again on my own, but I think Joe’s found a real vein here and is making some of his best music.

Joe dropped me out on 1st Avenue and we said our goodbye’s.  I’m feeling really optimistic about returning to London, feeling a strong presentiment of something good.

If you haven’t heard the music of Joseph Arthur, I highly recommend it.  Listen to a tune called ‘Enough to getaway’.  Then work through that album ‘Nuclear Daydream’ and ‘Redemption son’.  Songs like ‘Honey and the Moon’ and ‘In the Sun’ which Micheal Stripe and Chris Martin covered for Hurricane Katrina, are modern classics of our times.

Anna Gabriel has directed a video of my song ‘Can’t Control Myself’ follow here for more details will be up on website soon!

Adam

Been thinking a lot lately about my next incarnation. In my room in New York laid out with influenza, there were no books on the shelf that were to my tastes, so I went back in memory to the folk tales of my childhood.

Thought of Snow White and her seven dwarfs, thought of her laid out in her glass coffin, when she ‘dies’. Felt a little like her, my sick bed being my own glass coffin, a surveillance post.

A batch of DVD’s were delivered from the living room. Watched ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ starring David Bowie. I liked the movie, it went with my convalescence. You can sleep awhile wake up again and feel you’ve missed nothing. No plot to it, hallucinatory, like a William Burroughs novel, or life.

I felt like the alien, drinking cups of water, taking vitamins and dreaming strange news from another star. My room too resembled the man who fell to earth, with him he’d scattered a closet of cloths, a cupboard of pharmaceuticals, and as he’d landed he’d tipped over a bureau stuffed full with scraps of scribbled lyrics, crumpled receipts and out of date billets doux’s.

I slept lyrics, reciting them as I drifted off like people count sheep, I’d wake, still reciting them, hours later only to find them in a much better order, I’d reach for my bed-side table and scribble them down.

I thought of Sleeping beauty and the seven fairies at the party to celebrate her birth, six of the fairies bearing gifts to help her live a happy life and the seventh being Saturn or Satan cursing her with death and a long deep sleep.

I thought of the seven gods of the planetary spheres and all our lives and after-lives mapped out for us by the stars and the planets revolving round in circles. Are Job and Hecules still out there today in some corner of the world suffering the same trials?

I thought of the seven notes in the musical octave, I know you’ll tell me there are eight, but the eighth note is the same as the first only you’ve ascended into a new musical sphere.

I thought of Elijah no longer revolving in a circle but spiraling upwards, ascending into heaven in a whirlwind chariot of fire and triumph!

The infection got worse and my glands swelled up. I put two postcards up on my wall for moral support. I’d bought them previously at a card shop on Avenue A, one of Oscar Wild photographed by Napoleon Sarony circa 1882 the other of Arthur Rimbaud photographed by Etienne carjat cica 1871.

Whenever I looked up at Rimbaud my heart would beat a little better, my breast would heave up on the waves like his drunken boat at sea. Unlike ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ and it’s cargo of flemish cottons fled away with the waves, my scattered cargo were pieces of consciousness, half remembered songs that I was drawing back to me.

I remembered a song I’d come up with at heliocentric studios, in East sussex England, my friend Richard Causon had taken me there. Richard’s a piano player, one of the best the world has, but we sat with two guitars. Playing guitar with a piano player can move you in different directions. I came up with a verse, I could see a girl, vividly in my mind walking down Kensington Park Road, between Elgin Crescent and Blenheim Crescent, where the cafe’s and restaurants are open till late night with a warm glow, I could see her walking barefoot in the rain, unnerved and unhinged, her wet dress sticking to her body, the make-up running down her face.

We had a chorus too, but I found it weak, not musically, but lyrically it was limp had nothing to say. I disgaurded it.

Till now in my sick-bed it keeps coming back. I thought of an article I’d read in a bookstore in Notting Hill by Lester Bangs. It was about Van Morrison and the Velvet Underground, something about their music and song having many lifetimes behind it. I put the book back on the shelf and wandered round Notting Hill Gate in a serene state. Bangs had really excelled, the article had put me in a spiritual harmony, the same kind of evening harmony that the music itself puts me in. I never bought the book, and I guess you can look these things up on google, but I like to learn things by heart. I like to train my mind to remember.

I took my girlfriend out that night we met in the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road. I remember elatedly repeating into her big beautiful eyes ‘How many lifetimes? How many lifetimes?’ and her smiling up at me like I was half-crazed. I knew in that moment I loved her entirely.

I hit high fever, and deliriums till a courier with antibiotics was sent to me. I went into deep sleep, I could see the portrait of Rimbaud penetrating my dreams, like his poetry had tried to penetrate the godhead, to penetrate infinity like a saracen to bold a genius to know you have to win promotion gradually.

Like the archangels Lucifer and Michael, and their quarrel at the beginning of creation. Michael tried to wrest the crown from Lucifer’s head only for the emerald stone on Lucifer’s brow to fall to earth and be lost, like the unicorns of Atlantis that Noah neglected to make room for on his ark, the horn from their brow, the third eye lost beneath the flood, submerged in the waters of our subconscious.

In the end I think it was Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis that cured me. I watched ‘Some Like It Hot’ for the first time and laughed myself better. I’d like to take Marilyn Monroe out on a date in the next lifetime, or maybe I will in this lifetime if Job and Hercules don’t mind.

Like snow white in her glass coffin and the egyptians in their gigantic pyramids, I’m trying to point my incarnation converter mobile towards my happiest star.

I jumped up and sat at the edge of my bed feeling fresh. I rubbed my eyes, and on the bed-side table all these portions of consciousness piece themselves together…

Rain lit sky, wipe those eyes, headlights blur
A muffled drum, a beating heart, a distant hurt
Faint and pale the shelter line, calm and cold
Silk and steel, a still return her ribbons torn

She’s been sleeping in a stolen dream
Hideaway, hideaway

How many lifetimes?
How many lifetimes?
Dry your eyes

Beauty sleeps, the almond eye, the emerald stone
Face to face our challis burns, our dream of home

We’ve been sleeping in a stolen dream
Hideaway, hideaway

How many lifetimes?
How many lifetimes?
Dry your eyes

Trying to see you, trying to hear you
Trying to talk out loud
From beginning to beginning
Just to turn this light out

How many lifetimes?
How many lifetimes?
Dry your eyes

How many lifetimes?
How many lifetimes?
Dry your eyes

Getting ready for my last show tonight in New York Town Live at Googies Lounge. I’m on at 9.30 it’s now 6.25pm.

Lately I been having fun, fun, fun, enjoying my fill of the city before I head out. My roomy from London Miss Maybellene got in to town last week, she’d been travellin round America with her pals Nicho and Fin. They started in San Francisco headed out to L.A went to Vegas on gambling spree and joined ‘The Red 500 gang’. Then headed down to New Orleans for Voodoo fest. Hung out with McGowan and Finner. I’d been sober for six weeks living the dream, but when their party wagon rolled into town, I had to jump right on it.

We started in Westville on Avenue A… steak sandwhiches and a bottle of Malbeck red wine… I was so happy to see my pals! We then walked down avenue A and took pictures by the Joe Strummer muriel. ‘The Future is Un-written!’. We took our stools at Niagara bar.

I’d been so sick out here, and in bed for weeks I got through a ton of DVD’s one of them was ‘The Big Lebowski’. During the picture the dude had so many White Russians he had me dreaming about them between my mid-flu deliriums.

We got into Niagara and I insisted on The Red 500 gang joining me on a round of white Russians, we toasted ourselves. The bar tender had no milk so she measured it with bailies… whiskey, vodka, and kahlua, high times… I asked the bar-tender to play my favorite tune ‘Another girl Another Planet’ by The Only Ones and it was Up Up Up.

We headed out to Brooklyn to pals of Miss Maybellene then I took the gang to my favorite Bedford Avenue dive.. Rosmary’s Greenpoint Tavern where they serve ale in 2 pint paper cups called ‘Containers’. Containers all round!

We headed back in to the city to the Bowery Electric where our pal from London was deejaying. We hung out in the DJ booth where the owner Jesse Malin come by and treated us all to a round of tequilas. Nicho wisely threw his over his shoulder.

The next day followed suit, and was like so. Except this time for food we had sushi on 2nd Avenue. Afterwards I bought the whole troupe along to watch me play at Rockwood music Hall. It was my best show yet, a midnight show. I played harder than I have been playing and let off some steam, The Red 500 gang were in high spirits as were the Rockwood leftovers.

Seeing my friends from London got me excited about going home. We’re like kings of the hill in Hackney, in our Royal Oak converted party shack mansion.

London’s already been calling me up. I got a corporate party to play in Victoria on November 26th via my friends at Metropolis studios, and I’m talking with the Boogaloo in Highgate about putting on a Christmas party December 21st/22nd. I’ll tell you more about this keep in tune!

I gotta split, time to head out. Tonight’s gonna be a good one! All my mates are coming out for the Last Hurrah. I love you New York City… See you at the White Russian Afterparty.

Adam

I’m playing tomorrow Friday 6th of November and Friday 13th of November at Googies Lounge above the living room 154 Ludlow street 10002 New York, New York both sets are at 9.30pm see you there xx