10/04/00

Dear Arthur,

I find that at the moment I'm listening to a lot of Cuban music, for no other reason than the name of the country & the beats & rhythms, conjure up images in my mind. Partly made up from stories of adventure, that I read as a child & partly from old black and white films that used to fill weekend television. The images are the same as those that float through Ian Fleming's James Bond novels that I devoured in my youth, of another far-off, exotic land & time.

Tom Waits seems to conjure up a similar place with his best albums - albeit a darker, more sinister and edgy one.

So I listen to Xavier Cugat, Astor Piazzola, Carlos Gardel, Lecuona Cuban Boys, Tito Puente, Carmen Miranda, Machito, The Mambo Kings, Perez Prado and even the sublime Buena Vista Social Club. In them can be found the original songs, from which many English & American Pop songs have been taken, some in their musical entirety, and some less obvious plagiarisms; The TV Batman theme, Tony Bennett's 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams', Leo Sayer's 'When I Need You', Suzy Quatro's 'If You Can't Give Me Love', the list is almost endless. I even have a bootleg of the Beatles, singing 'Besame Mucho' live at the Star Club in Hamburg! There are numerous songs that I also recognise from my classical Spanish guitar LPs and the vast sea that is the classical music of the world. More obvious perhaps are those taken from within the five decades of western Pop music itself.

I guess there are only so many notes, and like any artist, a songwriter puts them together to make patterns from the chaos. It isn't always the original written/played version that I prefer of any piece of music, or song, but the one with which I have a strong mental association, either consciously with a memory connected to the first time I heard it, or just the way it is played or sung by a particular person, that strikes a chord (pun intended) with my own feeling for the order or sequence of notes therein.

I listen to those old records & watch those old films still, when I can, & the images and tunes of a long time before mine, are permanently mixed with my own real memories, giving me a knowingly false recall and response to these things, but it is almost more enjoyable for that - the place I used to mentally escape to has become part of where I actually live.

I still read my set of James Bond books (a sixties Pan printing) every couple of years, and I think what is really is for me, is that every time I read them, or every time I see a particular old black and white film, or hear a certain piece of music, the place to which I am transported remains exactly the same - every time - untarnished by time or progress. Like a jewel that is carefully wrapped up & hidden away, to be brought out and enjoyed on special occasions. Oh dear! Am I writing about the classical psychopathic disorder, of implanting fictional memories and emotions into the dark, empty spaces of the mind, that would be filled with real feelings and emotions in a normal person? Is that the real reason for my thirst for music? Because it is the way that I fill up my own emptiness? I wonder at my own success, as I cannot remember the small child I was, before I began. Maybe I should not, as the reason for starting was maybe not a happy one. Even so, who can remember who they were when they were 6 or 7, and maybe everyone does it, to degrees, in life, with different things, depending on what makes them tick. Just what would the world be like without music? You know, whether I am getting by in a happy bright world, or a dark lonely one, it's the getting by that I like, and somewhere in here is a will to survive that finds its own means, through me & whatever it can find in this world, and it is stronger than I am - or maybe that is the real me and all the rest is just an illusion of our human existence.

Love, Julian

- How's the LP coming along? I'm going to Bordeaux at Easter to see Mr. Sony...