Today my ‘office’ reached a level of chaos not even I could quite believe. But at least I managed to clear that space between my bed and the door, so my bedroom is back to the semi-relaxing space it once was before the muse took me and I decided there was no point clearing away the jack leads and the synth and the thumb piano and the 4-track and the guitar and mic stand when I was just going to get them all out again the next day anyway, so for a few weeks now I’ve been picking a delicate stub-toed path between the place where I try and sleep and the place right next to it where I try not to. My idea of a relaxing room is one festooned with instruments, sure, but this was getting silly. I kept hurting myself on stuff. This chaos was compunded by the strange Saturday morning incident a few weeks back when I leant on my cheap MFI bookcase that was always tenuous at best and hear it crack the way that only cheap furniture can and despite having been up til 7 I snapped into action (my books! on the floor! hell no!) and dismantled the toppling bookshelf and decanted my precious tomes into (alphabeticalized) boxes which are piled up next to where the instruments were. And now the books are spilling out as well, because I got urges to dig out Bukowski for my friend and Ring Lardner for my wife and the alphabeticalization went somewhat awry at that point and -

Well. the reason the instruments finally got a tidy was because I took them all out for a little jaunt last night, to a pub in Dalston called the Sussex, which is home to one of my favourite things, the Klinker club. The Klinker takes place in the Function Room of the pub. It was at the Klinker I saw my first ever jazz show, Charles Hayward and Pat Thomas, just about blew my head off, that did, and witnessed Bob Cobbing doing his Alan-Bennett-with-glossolalia thing before he died last year, and played a few improv slots myself, involving alarm clocks, recorders and a song called, I think, The Terror Of Now.

But here I was in the Sussex, on a Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in the pub bit next to the big china sheepdog and Bovril posters and drinking cheap vodka with my friends and laughing hysterically to Tina Turner and Foreigner songs and thinking, in a few hours, I, Frances May, in my faux-Egyptian ‘Tiki-Knit’ dress and busted up boots, I, drinking vodka and discussing 80s music and smoking like a singer oughtn’t, I, that is me, I am going to be singing songs to my friends. On My Own. I stopped drinking vodka and went and bought some nice biscuits to calm myself down. It didn’t work. In my head I could hear my ex saying ‘I bet you’re going to sound like Fursaxa.’ THANKS.

At 9.15 I switched on the laptop - I didn’t want to bring the laptop because it makes me look like a folktronica asshole but I didn’t have time to burn the little backing track I wrote and the bell samples onto CD before I came out - and knelt down by the mic. I had written a vocal melody late the previous night. I sang it; it tasted new in my mouth, as new as it actually was. Then I turned to my harmonium and began to play one note, one drone as my recordings of Dutch bells faded out. And then I really was on my own. I sang one song, a hymn called ‘Awake awake to love and work’, and went straight into another one, a sea shanty thing I wrote about Cornwall and the Looe Pool and stuff. As I sang and played, all at floor level, not because I’m shy but becasue the harmonium is supposed to sit on the floor, I felt a weird tingly peace descending on me. A weird happiness that there was no going back, tinged with a sadness that I would rarely sing with the conviction that I was singing with at that moment, on my own in front of a small group of friends, in the room where I saw Charles Hayward and Pat Thomas.

Everett advised me to talk between songs, so eventually I did. I explained I was going to sing an Appalachian song about what to do when your girlfriend’s family don’t like you (answer: kill ‘em). I worried out loud about the ring modulator pedal working (’It’s supposed to sound weird, can you hear it?’ I said, like it mattered. It didn’t). This was a prelude to a song I wrote that I didn’t want to say the title to, so I detracted from it by worrying about the pedal, which worked fine anyway. The song was called ‘ And from my horse I will wave at the heavens’, anyway, so you can see why I wouldn’t introduce it, on account of having a title like that. Of course, I could have changed the title I suppose, but it sounds OK when you sing it.

I got my nylon-string guitar out for the last song and made it make a tinkly robot sound with the ring modulator.
“The last time I played an acoustic guitar in front of people was when I was twelve, at a cheese and wine party,” I explained by way of apology,” and I played a Donovan song. But I’m not going to do that now, so, um. yes. Well. This song is dedicated to my wife for putting up with my craziness, and it’s called Staring at the Mosque.”

I felt it was the least I could do, after all my obsessive behaviour, to dedicate a song about said obsession to the person who had to listen to most of the fallout. Dedicate it to the person it’s about? Now that would suck.

And it was now that I felt the most vulnerable, playing an instrument I couldn’t really play, whispering lyrics about my heart without any pastoral/mythological/psychedelic/religious imagery to hide behind. Playing a love song, on nylon strings with clumsy fingers, to people I know, to people who’ve seen me make a noise, support their songs, hit a bass, scrape a violin, twiddle synth knobs, stay in the background always, for the last 7 years. It was almost as embarrassing as when I flipped out at a party last Christmas and punched my ex-boyfriend in the tummy and then fell over and banged my head on the floor as an extended version of ‘I feel love’ played in the background. Almost as embarrassing, but you know what? Nicer.As you can probably imagine. Less painful.

Afterwards I wanted to curl up on the floor and cry, but instead I strummed and hollered out a retarded version of the Byrds’ ‘I am a pilgrim’, as a kind of unwanted encore. Because by then I didn’t give a fuck. I felt warm all over and shaky. Like I’d been in a Turkish bath, or in the sea for a bit too long. In the corridor I hugged an old, dear friend. The guy I’d punched in the tummy. He was crying a bit. I didn’t know whether to feel bad or proud.

I just wanted to do it all over again, and better.

Posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2004by Frances May Morgan