ONE MY FAVOURITE PARAGRAPH FROM KIM GORDON’S “GIRL IN A BAND”…
In an honest and strangely fascinating book, it’s this one: “In 1980 New York was near bankruptcy, with garbage strikes every month it seemed, and a crumbling weedy infrastructure. These days it gleams and towers in ways most people I know hate and can’t understand. Hugging the parkway in the West Sixties and Seventies is an ugly sheet of Trump buildings, a monument to urban corruption, soft money, and natives – who should have taken to the streets – saying nothing. Farther down the island, joggers, baby strollers and blue and red bikes flow alongside a fluted, flower-filled river walkway alongside once-scary, now-forgotten docks, where gay men once met up in the dark for dates, hookups, and hookers in mink coats and high boots worked the nights until sunrise and breakfast.”
TWO OH GIVE ME A HOME, WHERE THE TAPE OPS DO ROAM…
This week’s newsletter from WowHaus (for all your modernist property needs worldwide, people) has not one but two houses with attached recording studios. One is Frank Zappa’s, on Woodrow Wilson Drive, LA.
“This is what the agent describes as the ultimate Artists’ retreat, complete with the famed Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. The house also has the kind of quirks you would expect for a Zappa house too, such as porthole windows and doors salvaged from vintage submarines.” Yours for $5.5 mil.
The other, with a more discreet seller, is St Ann’s Court in Surrey. “Moving on to the Coach House; that’s laid out over a single floor, currently used as a creative working and living space. A good amount of that is used as a recording space, originally built by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera (a previous owner) and used by the likes of Paul Weller, Robert Wyatt and David Gilmour. It has since been redesigned and now has a ‘large live room and a spectacular control room’.” Yours for around £9 mil. Well, not yours – or mine – obviously.
THREE RULE BRITANNIA IS OUT OF BOUNDS!
At daughter’s party at Battersea Arts Centre, Alan finds an old upright in a corridor. He – with the aid of Google and an iPhone – calls up the chords and lyrics for great pop songs like “Five Years” and “We Are the Champions” which he then proceeds to play, rather fabulously, in the style of Chas and Dave.*
FOUR A GUITAR PLANS CHEST, YOU SAY, VINCE?
I’m not even sure how I stumbled across this, but Vince Gill’s guitar collection is a treasure trove. He’s even had a custom built set of drawers to cushion and protect them, although (rather endearingly) he clunks two extremely rare Martin acoustics together at one point.
FIVE STEVE’S ON THE BOULEVARD, MIXING UP THE DR. PH. MARTENS INKS
From his desk in Paris, I receive Steve Way’s next cartoon for the William De’Ath column (a majorly eccentric column at that) in The Oldie, which he said he’d been waiting to do for years…
* for those who don’t know of them, Chas and Dave are “an English pop rock duo, most notable as creators and performers of a musical style labelled “rockney” (a portmanteau of rock and cockney), which mixes pub singalong, music-hall humour, boogie-woogie piano and pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll.”
For the full 5 Things experience, please click on the Date Headline of the page in the email and you will go to the proper site (which allows you to see the Music Player). Also all the links will open in another tab or window in your browser.
Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week 