This record has strong wrists like I wish I had. I’ve got blurry eyes. I tried to relax last night. I invited two friends over and we ate food and listened to Jack Rose and Sunroof! and Brownie McGee and watched Gozu, one of Takashi Miike’s more coherent (but none the less sick as sick can be) films. Imagine the nightmare journey of Like a Velvet Glove Cast Iron with all filters of American indie-comic taste turned to “Off” and none of the humanity. That’s not to say Gozu wasn’t suffused with humanity; it’s just that its humanity was, how should I say it, completely fucked. If you like your homoerotic paranoid yakuza quest movies with a shape-shifting mythical polysexual twist, and you like your humour as screwed and as slapstick as a drooling man with a bull’s head and y-fronts licking your face and a cafe run by bra-wearing, joke-telling eunuchs, then you should probably watch it.

But about halfway through (I’ve noticed that with Takashi Miike films I often lose it in the middle and perk up again for his unbelievable end sequences, which are usually so worth that mid-Japanese-film lull), I couldn’t sit still because there was an idea in my head. So I got up on pretence of getting some water or something and scuttled around a little drunk looking for a pen and I wrote some stuff down on a pink post-it in what I call my spirit writing, not because I’m a hippy or nothin’, but because it looks like it came from a fake dead person. I mean, I write really nice except when I’m having an idea, and then it looks like the craters of the moon graffitied by a psychotic medium. So I’m writing stuff down on the post-it and then again in my nice new notebook, and mark out in my head how I want the ‘chorus’ to go and I run up and down the stairs a few times in excitement. So then I went back to the film and I watched it and it was great, but all the time a song was writing itself neatly in my head and it was all I could do not to just leave the guys to the film and go write it.

After they went, I decided my wife was probably sleeping deep enough for me not to disturb her so I sat and sang and smoked cigarettes and sang and played and sang and wrote and then I looked at my phone and it was 4am. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. Now I’m supposed to be at work. I know at work for me involves doing office-type things from the comfort of my own home, and yes I am grateful, but it’s still work. And I am tired.

The thing is, since I’ve been reading about music, I’ve often read about musicians doing this staying up late thing, driven by a song. I’ve also, of course, seen it and been around it in bands, and forced myself to do it too. But it’s only this year, my 27th, too damn late (I reflect on my bad days), that I’ve actually felt it myself. I think a sneaky, resentful part of me thought they were making it up or something, that urge. I know it’s only step one in some process I should have started years ago, and just because you wrote something in a mini-frenzy at 2am and it came out as easy as birdsong doesn’t mean it’s any good, in fact it probably means it’s crap, probably means it’s cliched singer-songer bullshit, but still. I’m beginning to realise that you can pick songs apart and apart and apart but the only ones that cleave to you and won’t come off are the ones that sound as if they had to be made. Whether they’re ‘good’ or not, that’s beside the point.

I’m not talking about music, mind, just songs. For me, instrumental music’s something I build carefully and rightly and like a proper thing, or I improvise it, meddle with it but mostly leave it alone, let it visit me, think about it in terms of timbre and volume and effect, not what it ‘means’. It’s just the songs that pull your hair in the small hours and force you to give them some time. They don’t care if they’re good or not, either, they just want to hang out and inveigle themselves into your already-quite-full-thank-you life. They don’t care that you already have a stay-up-late-going-crazy art form that you adore, which is called WRITING ABOUT MUSIC, and you really don’t need another one. They want you to be 18 again, when you did actually stay up all night writing essays and making stuff, because sleep was boring and non-sleep made you look more cute and feel more crazy.

Now, this music thing and this writing thing (and this living thing and this working thing) is just making me look so old. It’s giving me lines. My friend said last week that frown lines were cool; “cooler than smile lines,” he said disparagingly. Sure. Not when you’re a girl, they’re not. If you’re pushing some kind of moody messed-up handsome guy image, then fine, frown at the sun and narrow your eyes and mutter about your troubles and the ladies’ll love it. But me, I do not have that option.

But I digress. Oh, but, listen, talking of youth and wonderfulness and all, you should all listen to Shystie’s new album. Because it, mostly, rules, and it reminds me not to listen to too much old men’s music (she says, putting an Incredible String Band song title in the title of her blog, and switching on the Buffalo Springfield CD). It makes me think of all the music that goes on right on my doorstep and about how exciting it is to be making it; it makes me think of how cool it must be to sing a song that goes ‘Ladies we can rule the world!’ and mean it. It makes me want to dance myself out of this tiredness and onto the next thing. Whatever that is.