I’M IN THE LIBRARY!

I wake up and look out of my window and something is different – the bands of silvery grey are twice as big (the road up to the park and the pond). The trees are gyrating to gales and it’s almost like they’re waving at me. Heavy lashing rain swathes horizontally. It’s flooded. Cars are turning back. I’m not even thinking about going to the ranch.

It’s just before 10 and it’s rare that I’m up this late but then I didn’t go to bed until 4 so it’s OK. I’ve reached an age where my parents’ generation would be thinking about a caravan in Arnside or a holiday in Benidorm. That was never my thing. I played guitar in a punk band. I could reasonably be playing gigs in a covers band entertaining the over 60s of Barnoldswick but I’m not.

I’m still playing guitar in a punk band playing fresh original stuff and that’s neat. I’ve pretty much stuck to the plot over the years. Punk rock taught us to peer between the cracks and that’s what I did.

I saw simplicity in the complicated and I saw bits of the future that all came true. Nothing fancy. Just the glaringly obvious. Grow your own food, because the day will come when fuckers will conspire to take away access to clean food for people like us. Make your own music. Make your own art. Keep believing. Keep trying and one day it will all come good.

One of Don Juan’s themes is impeccability. If you believe in something don’t just do it well. Do it impeccably. Once you see the bigger picture, you realise that there’s just no slack for not doing things properly. Do it right. Down to the last- and most-minute detail. There’s a hair’s breadth difference between aspiring for impeccability and being a control freak.

Last night it all came good. I just did what I’ve been doing for forty years. Business as usual. Nothing different. I like observing and coordinating and bringing the threads together to weave them into something bigger and better.

My thing is guitar playing and stringing little observational sentences together.

The library gig went exceptionally well. It wasn’t ordinary. It was extra-ordinary. It was punk as fuckety-fuck can be. Any snapshot from the evening could have been from somewhere ultra-cool like New York. Oh what a stunning building with its stained glass roof. Guggenheim? Pompidou? No, it’s Burnley and I’m in the library. I’M IN THE LIBRARY!  People came from: Australia; America; Amsterdam; Germany; London; Bath. (and Burnley of course).

We did a lot of rehearsing. Me, Gaz, Sam, Tyler, Dawn, Leon, Eamonn, Rebecca, Michael, Khany, Boff and a few other people and it came together nicely. Gaz was kind of the musical director. He was at every rehearsal with me. It was quite exhausting but worth it.

The highlight and the thing that mattered most to me was seeing Inger. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. As beautiful as ever. My life would have been so much more fucked without her. We were young when we first met and her stoic wisdom kept me on track when I needed it most. We’d been going out for quite a while before, in my sludgy slowness, I asked her when her birthday was. Really? That’s a coincidence. Same birthday.

We had an after-party at Burnley’s new cool bar. It’s seriously cool. It’s where the cool kids will be hanging out from now on.

Tyler’s just arrived. Tod’s flooded. The river has broken its banks.

In the library? Can you believe it? We made a cool newspaper with Casey’s photos and Boff and mine’s interviews with the first generation cool punk kids – the exhibition is on for a while and the newspapers are there for free – make sure you go and get one.

I’M IN THE LIBRARY!