My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): 14/8/2004 - Kooba Radio

< previous

next>

After playing the inaugural HIBBETTFEST I sped back to That London in order to fulfill a long standing obligation to attend a recording session for Kooba Radio. Kooba is an Internet Radio Station - nowadays pretty much everybody has their OWN internet radio station, but they were among the first to start doing it consistently, and certainly one of the grooviest. This grooviness is down to several factors - the skill of the production, the fact that they played only "unsigned" music (i.e. only bands who completely owned the copyright in their music, to avoid PRS/Licensing hassle), but mostly because they were SO VERY GOOD at going to the pub.

Much of the credit for this must got to Mr Johnny Yeah, lead broadcaster and figurehead of the organisation, who is one of those people who, wherever he goes in the world, will be accepted as a REGULAR in whatever the local equivalent is of a PUB. Time was when being a NOTED SOCIETY WIT got you invited to soirees in saloons and probably a touching up by noted society Lords and Barons, but nowadays it seems that Public Bar Raconteurs are like MYSTIC NOMADS, floating from pub to pub with a retinue of pals, pints and gags, and I was VERY pleased to be joining the caravan for the evening.

We had a GRATE night in the pub, although I did become aware of something a little unsettling as the evening progressed. Johnny is of a similar age to me while most of the rest of the Kooba Krew are of a somewhat more recent vintage, and as we got further and further into our conversation I realised that more and more of the younger people were becoming quiet. Was it because our REPARTEE was so THRILLING that all they could do was sit back and BASK in awe? Or was it that we were talking about telly programmes that only WE remembered, as nobody else had been BORN then?

It was GOOD TIMES though, as demonstrated by the fact that the recording, scheduled for 7pm, didn't get going until after ten o'clock. I had a Last Train to go and catch so we did my bits first, starting with a version of "These Foolish Things", played by me with new words sung by Johnny. It SHOULD be a louche, easy going, devil may care sort of song, but the large quantities of BOOZE consumed during the day, in multiple postcodes, led me to HANG onto the guitar for DEAR LIFE, exerting every ounce of concentration at my command just to do the chords right.

After THAT I recorded a version of a song I'd written that week, "The Fight For History", as a KOOBA EXCLUSIVE for later use. It's all about the FACT that, when Margaret Thatcher dies, the media will go into an OVERDRIVE of BOLLOCKS, hailing her as A Great Leader rather than a MASSIVE EVIL who almost destroyed everything GOOD about being British and whose malign influence is STILL screwing up the country - who was it, after all, who persuaded building societies to become banks and relaxed regulations to allow banks to loan beyond their means? The answer: THATCHER!

Once again I was reminded of my GRATE AGE: though Mr Yeah sat beside me NODDING SAGELY to my words, most of the other people in the room just looked CONFUSED. Thatcher? Wasn't she in the War or something?

I went home feeling OLD. OLD and DRUNK.

< previous

next>