Carving

So, a relaxing bit of linocutting this morning. You can almost hear David Sylvian crooning peacefully in the background. I've been enjoying the album by one of his 'side projects', Nine Horses - the perfectly-titled 'Snow Borne Sorrow' - that middleman alerted me to just recently. It's a particular lovely entry in the extensive Sylvian back catalogue that managed to slip under my radar back in 2005 (mind you, there was plenty that went 'below radar' that year!) What you certainly can't hear is the rather less peaceful sound of the two blokes dismantling the bathroom above my head. No doubt it'll be great when it's finished, but today it's crashing, lathe and plaster and clouds of dust (not to mention the prospect of having to wash in the kitchen sink tomorrow!)

Still, this afternoon walking home after work I got to enjoy once again the sunshine, the blossom and the new Wedding Present album. The latter is a surprising pleasure - the last one was far from their best and I wasn't expecting too much from this one, to be honest, despite harbouring a continued affection for the band. I've been a follower of 'the Weddoes' since I went to Leeds Uni as a callow youth back in '87. They were pretty much the house band at the time, based in a house in Leeds 6, and you'd often see David Gedge pushing his trolley round Morrison's in the Merrion Centre. In time they developed out of the whole tinny C86 indie-with-a-small-I thing until, in 'Sea Monsters' they quietly managed to produce one of the key guitar albums of that fecund period in the late 80's/early 90's (up there with 'Isn't Anything', 'Nevermind' or 'Daydream Nation', even?) - a big, squalling angst and emotion-ridden 'monster' indeed. But Mr. Gedge always struggled with 'pop', it seemed. I interviewed him for fanzines on a couple of occasions at the time and he was always banging on about it, "it's just pop, innit" this-and-that. So the Wedding Present spent a year trying to crash the 'pop' charts every month with their ill-fated 'Hit Parade' project and then kind of ran out of steam for a while. Eventually Gedge went off to do his 'pop' band Cinerama, who, it turned out, were great as well, though I only really 'got' them later on. The big surprise was when (ironically enough also in '05, I just checked...!) the reformed sparkly-new noughties-version Wedding Present turned out be an excellent prospect with a sound that managed to reign in all the noise, indie and straight-up cinematic cinerama 'pop' you could possibly want. The comeback album, 'Take Fountain', was great (as in almost-if-not-quite-the-equal-of 'Sea Monsters' type great?) and Gedge has gone on to make a pretty good fist of (slightly crankily) revisiting past glories whilst still producing something new and worthwhile. Plus he grew up, got out of Leeds and saw the world - bless, the boy done good! And the new one's a corker, and I'm looking forward to the next tour...