Little Horse called at 02.10, just arrived home from Cairo and the Pyramids. Her timing was perfect: I was mid-way into a nocturnal elimination and, fortunately, the Tokyu is now equipped with bathroom telephones. Sitting on the po (standing at night is dark, dozy & dangerous) I was internally in conversation with Toyah, telling her my Valentine card is on prominent display in #742. Fitting then, as we bade our telephonic farewells, that Beaton the Wonder Bun also eliminated himself in front of Toyah. The remedy for this rabbitly behaviour, & recommended by the Houserabbit Association, is castration. Toyah feels this is a little too radical a solution for Bun.
At the Imperial Hotel, where Crimson stayed in 1995, the new toilets are dual action and also function as bidets. The operation of the flush, for one unpractised in the functioning of these new very-watery closets, can be hazardous. But men from Dorset learn quickly, especially when their privy parts are sprayed unexpectedly with jets of cold water.
Tets & Yoko from Pony Canyon met me at Narita airport. We landed about 30 minutes late on a 12 hour 30 minute flight from Chicago. The man next to me sniffed continually for the entire period I was awake. Every minute, an eruptive series of sniffs. I accepted that for Mr. Sniffy this was not a purely physiological condition: this was a nasal tic. Thank you God for the opportunity to experience the continual irritation of Mr. Sniffy.
The Pony Canyonmobile was equipped with an on-board computer guidance system to direct us to the hotel. The two hour journey from the airport to the city gave Pony Canyon & DGM's Venal Leader an opportunity to touch base and prepare for next week's work.
Regular Web visitors may have seen Tets' photo on his trip to DGM in January. Tets feels that only die-hard Crimson fans understood ProjeKct Two when we played here in April 1998. He says there is confusion regarding Crimson & the ProjeKcts. Apparently in Japan the 1980s Crimson wasn't regarded as a definitive formation, in comparison to the 1970s incarnation, until Crim toured Japan in 1995. Then, says Tets, the evolution was better understood. On this, basis the ProjeKcts' work to date will be going down a storm in 2007.
Tets' comments focus the ongoing Crimson dilemma: how does an "established" group continue to reinvent / renovate its own "tradition"? My view, that we re-orientate towards clubs and reposition the front line over double / triple drum electronica, has not yet been accepted. An alternative proposition to this, presented to Bill several days ago, has not been accepted either.
So, how do we change our fate? According to Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, mystical Judaism suggests these four ways:
1. By prayer;
2. Acts of charity;
3. Changing the manner in which we live our lives;
4. Changing our name.
A party of old friends & colleagues were waiting in the lobby of the Capitol Tokyu to greet the Dribbling Gigster - Masa & Miho Matsuzaki, Atsushi Naito (music-biz Power Lawyer of Terror), Rocky (who looked after us at Pony Canyon), Mr. Jun Sato of Pony Canyon, & Yuka from Opium (Arts) in London, visiting her mother & sister in Kyoto. Masa thoughtfully brought a capuccino machine for the room: yes! Life may now proceed. The vacuum-with-a-bed-in-it is transformed by flowers, fruit & greetings from Masa, Atsushi, Rocky & Mr. Udo (the leading Japanese promoter), 3 guitars from Fernandes (to get up to speed for P3) & a ghetto blaster on loan from the Pony Canyon office. I find myself unable to survive on the road if reliant upon Starbucks, and other in-house music suppliers, for sonic nutrition.
Backtracking I: Thursday morning 11th. February. Collected in the lobby of the American hotel, driven to Amsterdam train station, delivered to the platform. Carrying luggage loaded for intercontinental travel, I am clueless as to where any wandering traveller could find their way around the station. I couldn't have bought the right ticket, or got to the right platform. Even my Amsterdam courier struggled.
The most noticeable feature of the train to Brussels, and the arrival platform: a proliferation of mobile `phones. All around, everywhere, `phones going off, calls being made, conversations in full flight. Jamming devices are now commercially available, but illegal in England.
Brussels: arrival c. 12.30. Collected and driven to the Rough Trade offices through an historic city whose architecture is being systematically destroyed. La Grande Place is one of my favouritist places of all time: an alchemical cosmology constructed in buildings & statues, I was once told by a local musician.
The only non-smoking room in the Rough Trade office was put aside for interviewing. Interviewers: Gert Keunen, Thierry Colojon & Christophe Verbiest. Each one hour, no photography & 10 minute breaks between interviews. Almost a holiday.
A short flight back to Heathrow, a Hotel Hoppa bus No.3 to the Sheraton Skyline, arriving c. 21.00 brainless & mighty slack.
Backtracking II: Friday morning 12th. February. Up at 05.00 & Hotel Hoppa from Sheraton Skyline to Heathrow Terminal 3, check-in amidst a packed UA lobby on an overbooked first flight to Chicago. Uneventful 8 hours 30 minutes in the air. Transfer by airport train to Terminal 1 and then on to Mr. Sniffy & his Demon Nose of Massive Irritation.
03.40 A question raised in Brussels: why do interviews?
1. Interviews are a pointed stick for the interviewee to:
i) Reflect on their aims;
ii) Consider the degree to which these aims are in process of being reached;
iii) To clarify one's personal & professional process.
2. To present one's work to the public.
Interviews are normally presented or explained as "promotion". This is not how I see them, although this is also true. And "free publicity" is not free.
The concern of the musician is music; the concern of the professional musician is business. I am not prepared to compromise the music: the compromise is in how I live my life. For this professional musician, interviews are a legitimate form of presenting my work to the public - providing I feel that I have something to say. In Crim's 30th. Anniversary year, I am prepared to spend more time talking about the group's longer present moment than would usually be the case.
A standard clause in Virgin record contracts (such as the Sylvian - Fripp deal) binds the artist to doing interviews (which cannot be unreasonably refused). I insisted on personal exemption from the clause, although I undertook extensive interviews on behalf of my work with David.
3. To tweak & unfix public expectations.
4. The interviewer provides a field of energy which enables the questions to be answered.
5. The interviewer might present an unanticipated question (but unlikely).
Notes on interviewers:
1. Almost no interviewers have real questions.
2. Almost no interviewers know what a real question is.
3. Almost no interviewers know how to ask a question, even if the question is close to being "real".
4. Smarty-pants interviewers come to joust with me.
5. Only a small proportion are deliberately nasty (the opposite used to be the case).
Perceptions, in Europe, of RF's career seem to be divided into two streams:
i) The Crimson line;
ii) Fripp & Eno / electronica.
I am very grateful to all the writers who take a continuing interest in my work. This is not platitude.
06.11 Am I up yet? Well, I've had a shower so maybe this is morning.
09.14 The Garden Room has been redecorated, re-vibrated and extended since the last time I was here. The essentially Sixties' feel is now essentially Eighties' and the breakfast buffet table has been divided into two: hot and tasty on one, cold and tasty on the other.
Sylvian - Fripp stayed here in 1992. Then, I sat in a window seat overlooking the Japanese water garden watching the swishing of large coi; drinking coffee & gently nibbling for three hours over breakfast, reflecting, seeking to make sense of the EG debacle & understand the characters of Messrs. Alder & Fenwick.
It is impossible to describe to reasonable people, even those in business, how the music industry is not a business as normally understood (a comment made by an interviewer in Belgium). The nature of the industry is so fundamentally exploitative & dishonest that the reason boggles. (Remember Lord Devlin, in the Court of Appeal, refusing to release the Birmingham Six? Lord Devlin could not conceive that English police would falsify evidence, so he dismissed the appeal. A later Court of Appeal overturned the convictions).
Today the Garden Room's breakfast music of choice was The Beatles live c. 1964. It is very hard for me to accept this as a "background" to breakfast, or anything else. But after 30 minutes the noise of diners, cutlery & howling toads overwhelmed the music: the sound system was not sufficiently committed to bevoomerating the amplitude of its sonic download.
12.04 Sister has checked her message machine from the road and telephoned her bRuvVeR. Yo!
After the last Diary entry I dropped into bed. Getting up at 17.45 was an effort. Legs snapping like whipcords - not, I've been out for a Starbucks and to acquire milk for my own beastly coffee creations on Masa's cappucino machine.
19.24 Toyah's timing has been impeccable for the second time in a row. Your diarist was in post-Starbucks' coffee-driven evacuation mode upon the Tokyu po as the telephone rang.
23.42 In four hours' time in England the Valentine programme of "Songs of Praise", which visited our home, will be broadcast. Here, with not enough energy to do something and too much energy to do nothing, I attempt to be useful in small, functional ways.
"The only contribution we make is the quality of our work."
