i'm a loser, baby

Something I am very good at is losing things.

I wrote some notes and observations on some pieces of paper and it was my intention to use this opportunity to pass these on to whoever might be interested. So now, of course, I have lost these pieces of paper and am left wondering whether such words of insight will ever return to me.

I lose things all the time. Mostly, I think it springs from chronic absent-mindedness. I will often park my car outside houses having forgotten the fact I have not lived there since the mid nineties. I lose clothes. I don’t mean socks (although, obviously these are lost on a daily basis) but jeans, winter coats, 3 piece suits. I find it hard to believe I go places and leave without my jeans. If this were the case, I imagine I’d remember the trouserless journey home.

I recently discovered that I had lost a guitar. And to entrust me with my own passport is just irresponsible on the part of Her Majesty’s government.

And once lost, most items will never resurface.

At home, this is not such a problem. My wife, Emma has skills enough for the two of us when it comes to organisation. But I am always amazed at how well I can get things lost by myself in the confines of a small car. It is my belief that with a long enough touring schedule, I could return home with nothing more than the shirt on my back – possibly not even that.

So maybe I could put my gift to the use of mankind. Maybe nuclear waste could be disposed of cheaply by giving it to me and telling me to look after it for a month on the road. A week later and it would be lost beyond the wit of any Geiger counter.
The only flaw with this is that the shit and chaff that you would throw out anyway, that’s the stuff that sticks around. I can lose a $20 bill in a second, but the business card of a Tennessee Honda dealership has crossed the Atlantic four times in the bottom of my bag.

Maybe that’s fate telling me I need to get a Honda. And If I hadn’t replaced so many lost items and dropped so many banknotes , maybe I could have bought one.

studio diaries 2 - the perfect storm

Tonight I drove out to my little home-from-home studio and the sky was lit up by a distant electrical storm. Every few seconds another bolt would illuminate the clouds throwing light all around for the briefest moment. It was quite beautiful. I felt like a storm chaser driving headlong into the eye of a tornado or something.

I arrived at my destination and it wasn’t even raining. I opened the place up and switched things on before a light rain started. By the time I had made a coffee and settled into my comfy chair, it was lashing against the windows. I had listened to about four seconds of last nights recording when the room exploded with light and sound before falling into blackness and after the desperate pop of indignant loudspeakers cut off mid sentence, silence.

Well, not the silent kind of silence. More the raging lightning storm versus the drum n bass synth riffing of an errant burglar alarm kind of ear-shreddingly loud and irritating silence.

But the dark was certainly very dark.

I navigated by the light of the frequent lightning strikes to a box of matches and a vanilla candle (I would like it to be known that the reason for the presence of a vanilla candle is not because I believe in the power of aromatherapy to help create a calm, nurturing environment in which to build something beautiful. I took on the lease for this building on a day when the wind was blowing from the south. When the north wind blows, or for that matter, on a still day, the 120 yard proximity of the local refuse and recycling centre becomes distinctly apparent. It doesn’t take a great deal of new age hippyism to conclude that the smell of vanilla is more pleasant than that of several tons of household waste on a hot day.) By candlelight, I waited a few minutes before shutting down the already dead electricals and locked up again.

By the time I got back in the car, it had stopped raining again. The storm had already moved on to inconvenience someone else. The burglar alarm timed out and switched off and just then, the silence became pretty darn quiet.

I ruined it by starting the engine and driving home through fresh puddles.

The thunder is now rolling somewhere out over the English Channel. I guess tomorrow, I’ll go and see if everything still works. I suppose tonight ranks about as close to a near death experience as riding a bicycle or wearing shoes but it felt like a minor adventure for me. And I get a night off. Result.

studio diaries 1 - old friends

Today, I broke with tradition and invited another person into my music making place. It was drums day and recording drums unassisted can be very difficult, especially where I work as the drums are on a different floor to the control room. This means making adjustments to the settings on one floor, hitting record, running downstairs, playing a minute of drums, running back upstairs, listening back and making further adjustments. This can take all day and has resulted in a loathing for drum recording and also in unbelievably powerful thighs.

So my friend and occasional touring sidekick, The G Man came by to help out. As a handy studio recordist and drummer, he was the perfect man for the job.

Before touching any microphones comes possibly an even more frustrating process than the stairmaster workout: drum tuning. As a guitar player, I cannot comprehend a world without the digital tuner. Tuning drums though is not such an exact science, it’s like a zen art. Every tiny movement changes the sound of something else. There isn’t a single, exact “in tune” but I have learned there are a great many “out of tune” sounds that can be achieved through blind fumbling with a drum key.

There are a few choices of drum at my disposal. I bought a new Premier kit when I first started touring with a band, got a new Ludwig snare drum when I was the stand-in drummer for my friends’ band. I also have some bits from the collection of Joey Love, my drummer of choice.

Before that, I was using a kit which was given to me by the old manager of my old old band from the mid nineties. He was moving house and told me there was a really nice vintage drum kit in his barn which he had no room for at the new place.

So I drove out and discovered something vaguely drum-shaped under a lot of straw and barn mess. I cleaned chicken shit off those drums for hours to reveal a kit which was one small step up the ladder from the fisher price my first drum set and the drummer in my band could not even look at it.

The other drum I have, I now realise is the one musical instrument I have had longer than any other. A guy called Gareth from my school left this snare drum in my friend’s garage 15 years ago and it ended up with me. It looks like crap, old and rusty, tarnished and a little bent. It utilises cable ties, gaffer tape and garden twine in order to fulfil its basic function.

After hours of tuning and listening and hitting things, the newer and more expensive gear was sat in the corner and we were left with the rust bucket snare and the chicken shit kit.

The last time this setup was used was in the recording of my first album when this embarrassing collection of percussion was all I had.

I find myself comforted by the realisation that sometimes all you have is all you need.

The Unauthorised Autobiography of David Ford

Chapter I – The Early Years

To really get to grips with what a man is all about, you have to go back and look at the men who helped shape him. My family heritage is very important to me and is the source of constant pride and inspiration.

Pioneering has always been in my blood. My paternal great grandfather, Ernest Cecil Ford was the first Englishman to be successfully shot from a cannon.

His son, my grandfather Sir Edward “Bruce” Ford served in Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s cabinet in the position of Secretary of State for Air, a mostly obsolete position during peacetime but an honour nonetheless. He took the responsibility of this office, however, incredibly seriously and not content with simply relaxing into the trappings of Westminster, he worked tirelessly in the surprisingly diverse field of works under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Air. During his tenure, British ornithologists classified over 3,000 new species of bird including Bruce’s Green Pigeon, which was named in honour of Sir Edward. In addition, he successfully raised the level of oxygen in the London air, peaking in July 1956 with an O2 reading in Battersea of 78%, a time fondly remembered in England as “the summer of chuckles” . He also commissioned leading scientists to embark on a diverse range of research projects and by 1956 was able to announce to parliament that the bumble bee’s flight is officially impossible and is not to be recognised by Her Majesty’s Government. The impact was felt across the globe and the price of honey plummeted on all international markets. With intelligence showing the Russians were in development of a fully flighted bee, the world teetered on the brink of war for a brief moment. Only brave and skilful diplomacy led by my grandfather averted an international catastrophe. The incident was hushed up at the time and details remain classified by the terms of the 1920 Official Secrets Act but every year at Christmas, with a glow in his cheek from a half bottle of sherry, we’d hear old Pops tell his story about the birds and the bees.

Despite his great works, the Air Ministry was disbanded in 1964.

My father, Ralph Caesar Ford, the youngest of 8 sons, started working at the age of 14 as a salesman. Mostly selling door-to-door, he displayed great ability and soon became one of Britain’s most successful goods pedlars. Legend has it that one summers day in 1971 a disgruntled rival bet my father a pound note that he couldn’t sell 4 tons of horse shit to the people of Stockport before sundown. Never one to refuse a challenge, he accepted and set about shifting his stinking wares. He sold that shit off as modelling clay at the school of art, shampoo at the beauty salon, axle grease at the bus depot and marijuana at the local high school. Within 4 hours he had sold it all and was hailed as the nations finest salesman. He had managed to get ordinary people to buy horse shit and make a lot of money in the process. He now works as the executive producer of American Idol.

He married my mother, Sandra O’Shea, the daughter of irish cattle folk in Croydon.

I was born in 1978 in the hull of a wrecked Viking longboat. My parents, taken with the fad for Norse mythology which swept the hippy communities of southern England in the late seventies had chosen this location for its sympathetic energies. They were happy to see me come into the world on a Thursday: the day named for Thor, the Norse god of thunder and hoped that I would grow strong in his image.

At school I was an appalling student. By the age of 14 I was able to read at the level of a spaniel. Diagnosed with crippling word-blindness, number- blindness, colour-blindness, it was a damn miracle I could see anything at all. The other kids soon caught on to my conditions and would often throw bicycle tyres at me. The resemblance to both the letter O and the number zero meant I would have no chance of seeing it coming.

My life was to change one afternoon while I was hiding in one of the many school cupboards which would offer me refuge. I found the old marching band euphonium. Our school had not had a marching band for many years, not since Mr. Pottsreich, the music professor was fired for teaching the children 3 semesters of Nazi propaganda songs and trying to start a school militia. This dusty old tarnished instrument would prove my salvation. I would spend every available minute of the day in the cupboard adapting classic rock for solo euphonium. Hendrix, Zeppelin, Sabbath. I would sometimes branch out into some progressive, experimental material, I would play the seminal Genesis double concept album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” in its entirety scarcely pausing to draw breath. Over the following 4 years I learned to play as many musical instruments as I could find, working through the brass and woodwind sections, percussion and strings with an insatiable appetite.

While an enthusiast, I never saw music as a career or a lifestyle. That was until I was sitting at home watching television when a revelation appeared to me. I saw on my screen the most perfect vision of all that is musically righteous. Such a man, a man who moved with swagger and sang with a voice like a torpedo to the heart. In his leather-gloved hand was an immaculate Gretsch archtop guitar and I knew I had found my hero. The song was called Faith and the man: George Michael.

I followed George like he was my messiah for 4 months, sleeping on his doorstep, rifling through his garbage, harassing his friends and staff, just trying to get answers and guidance. Every time I got arrested, it would only harden my resolve. Then one day finally he spoke to me the words I needed to inspire me to forge my own path. Leaning from his bathroom window, he and another gentleman each fixed me with an intense glare and George shouted the words I will never forget: “why don’t you just fuck off you little shit”.

The next day I traded in my euphonium for a guitar and never looked back.

this one goes out to the cool kids...

Hell is other people

And yet we appear to pay so much attention and give so much respect what other people say is right.

Fashion is an industry entirely built upon the concept of being accepted by and gaining the approval of others by compromising ones actual individuality and gravitating toward that of an apparently knowing elite consensus. The genius of this is that every season, the fashion from last season becomes obsolete and the style-conscious consumer is forced to spend top dollar in order to pick up the latest threads or run the risk of being seen to be off the pace. Lots of money is thus spent on overpriced, cheaply made shit that never has to last more than a few months because even if the stitching holds out, it will be criminally wack before the year is through. Somebody laughs all the way to the bank while you are left wondering whether that tribal print bandana could be used as a tablecloth.

The reality is, however, that in the modern day, there is no voice of the masses. The people do not have the power and nothing captures imagination of the public. Trends are dictated by the few. These “tastemakers” have developed reliable avenues for governing the will of the many. And the primary weapon is shame.

Have you noticed that those who claim to have an ethos of free spiritedness and individualism are often the most uniform? Goths assert their refusal to conform by dressing the same as each other.

If ever there was a good reason to be fearful of fashion, I give you: the 1980’s.

These people didn’t think they looked ridiculous but history has proven that yes, they did. And if we had any free will and sense of decency, we would have pointed an alarmed finger and exclaimed “the emperor is wearing fluorescent towel socks”.

But you daren’t because other people might think you a frightful square.

The time is ripe to call a spade, a spade and to understand that the hot new fashion will be revealed as actually quite tragic and the hot new buzz band is probably not very good.

This is how revolutions begin comrades, the people rising up and demanding a better deal.

And if we are not as a people to throw off the shackles of oppression and fashion, then we can, at least, as individuals rage against this silly machine and accept certain truths as self-evident: some things are just great and some things are just awful, fashions will come and go, but a quality suit and a well written song will still be worth having in your life for years to come.