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Music is Up - Peter Gabriel

I love the autumn. Driving home last night was wonderful. It was not quite dark and the lights looked really cool against the dark blue. My daughter and I looked out of the bedroom window at the sky where there seemed to be searchlights scouring the clouds. My wife said later that she thought it was a gathering in a nearby garden who were playing with torches but of course I like to think that it was some more interesting reason like searching for aliens or a stolen military aircraft. As kids we always think War is exciting. Even the geeky boys who read books and don't like football will watch a war film. It takes a lot of growing up to realise that warfare means injury and death in the most horrible ways. This is growing up that not everyone does. In fact I would think that all small boys grow up retaining a small part of their fascination with weapons and fighting. I am not sure whether you would classify me as pacifist but I generally don't like the idea of bombing as a solution. Despite this, I still get a buzz out of reading about military aircraft and even from playing with military flight simulators on the PC. Is this dangerous. I would like to think that I have enough nouse to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I sometimes think that the most dangerously violent TV programmes are the ones where nobody ever gets injured like the A-Team. It seems that there is a lack of horror at what happens in the world. Why does the news never show the dead bodies? We always see a few bloodied but living people carried away from the scene but the severed limbs and scraps of flesh have always either been cleaned up or edited out. I would guess that most people watching this sort of news item do not sit there and imagine the real horror. Instead they thank a deity that it is not them and go back to their meals. Then again, I am assuming that they even bother to watch the news.

This is the first time I have managed to listen to the latest Peter Gabriel album. I don't seem to be able to get the time required to sit down and listen to something straight through. I always get distracted. That hour at night needs to involve sitting down at the table, writing, listening to something on the CD rather than sitting in front of the TV. Anyway, the Peter Gabriel album. Album? That is so 1970's but saying CD seems wrong and 'cut' or 'disc' sounds like Alan Freeman. I always get slightly disappointed when he sings for the first time on an album but within a few minutes the timbre of his voice becomes quite special, almost an instrument. I have always worried deep down that singing is not quite real. Writing a song about anything is an artificial comment on it, which gets in the way of what you are trying to say. This does not stop me feeling elation, sadness and admiration when a really good song delivers its emotional payload. (yuk!) It's a bit like computer games. I like them to be as real as possible, not some symbolic representation of the world but a film of the world - as close as you can get. Italian Plumbers in some sad second-rate copy of Wonderland - Hedgehogs. They might be OK for kids but I am sure they are really aimed at adults.

Great! Twangly guitar. I love twangly guitar - those loose bass strings rattling against the body. I wanted to be a rock star. Everyone does at some point. I took some pictures for a band called Fergus about ten years ago. They were playing at The Flying Picket and I got some great photos which I may be able to dig out sometime. I tried to duplicate each photo - once with the flash on and once off; it was too loud and flashy to try and use any settings on the camera so I just pointed and shot. I got one excellent photo of the singer with a spot behind him and the rays coming forward like the sun. Their manager told me we shouldn't show that one to him as he might get a bit to bigheaded. I think I have their tape somewhere. They were typical of the time, very loud indie rock but hey they were a band and I knew them. Their bass player went on to be in Electrafixion for a time. I saw him play with them in Liverpool before Echo and the Bunnymen reformed. Very loud. That and Lush are responsible for my tinnitus.

Making money from the sick. The season drags us down to cool and calm reflection in the depths of the varnished woods, the green and gummy clearings where the world goes on without us, like an unwatched TV. In their hovels, their spiritless boxes, the baby thieves wake and make their first million before breakfast. Wait for years until they get sick and then we will steal everything back from them. One Million, Two Million. Money makes you blind to the past. In those woods, those natural screens and factories, we hide, lie dormant for millennia as the world goes on around us. We write to the rhythm of the fall of leaves, the percussion of the fall of rotten trees to fall apart, decay and make food for their own offspring. The seasons' lights become our days, our clocks, the tick of centuries that pass until we rise up from the loam and litter, a hand to the sky to find the sun, the moon and stars. And then we turn on the thieves. Their remedy remains in these trees and plants. A cure for cancer, a dead stop to the common cold, the last equation and unified field falls like just one building coming down to help explain the world for all of us. We have turned ourselves around and now we look to the next destination, the stars above us. We will spread this plan, this spiral, through the universe and fill space with living things.