from
Humbug 23,
released December 1, 2023
This was another attempt to just write a song, though it does rely heavily on my delight in the writings of Raymond Chandler. Like all of us, Chandler was not a perfect human being, & his work does contain some mid 20th century white male attitudes most of us might find embarassing now, but his prose is also animated by a dazzling facility with words & am almost visceral contempt for the way mid 20th century US society is organised.
I was trying to explain this to the small audience that had turned up to a sunday folk evening at The Geese & Fountain near Grantham (a brilliant pub run by Nick & Kate until covid & the greed of the owners ruined everything for them). They responded with hostile incomprehension. When I warned them the song contained jazz chords, they looked seriously alarmed, and when i started songing the word "dick" - that was it - they all left.
I recorded it first with Roger Stevens & Ali Gavan on drums on the "That's More Like It" CD, (where it sounded a bit like Dr Feelgood without the demented genius guitar-playing), but since then I have been working on a way to play it as an acoustic guitar based song. We tried it with the Acoustic Irregulars (Sian Allen & Fae Simon) ... i had trouble playing the riff & singing the words, so i rewrote it as the sort of torch song that i thought Chandler might listen to when he was finishing of a bottle of rye. Fae said the original version was better & i should go away & practice.
The torch song became "The Blues Nowadays" which featured in last month's Bandcamp Friday release.