Given my imprimatur as a purveyor in popular music of precarious sounding easy listening instrumental tracks, happily, I'm never in need of studio time to "lay down some vocal takes." My logorrhea is limited to this here. A doubly fortunate thing, as I am in need of some time this weekend to lay down a tub of No Nonsense decking stain on the deck at the top of the garden.
Later on last year, I got around to recording Getting Ready For Nothing, which is a little more restless and a little less easy listening, less easy to listen to than the archetypal deluxe Ancient Champion sound. The recording was typically fraught in the end as it evolved not far, and then sometimes too far from it’s original iteration. You know, the Apple computer company makes really quite great sounding fake trumpets and so when a real trumpeter came along and I wondered whether it was possible to swap out those Apple trumpet lines for something a bit more authentic... It was tantamount to disaster. Not least of all because the non-virtual trumpeter plays everything correctly the first time and refuses to play it again. Not even to humour dear old dad.
I’d been listening to The Saints and other metallic records that feature brass blistering all over. That was the general idea too, to do something like that for Getting Ready For Nothing. Like an Easy antithesis to the Temptations Get Ready Here I Come. Don't Get Ready I Won't Be Coming. No one will. It was wholly informed by being marooned inside, not indoors, inside, and being pummelled by the pandemic and the cumulative daily rinse and repeat fatigue fugue cycle of getting ready for nothing. At all. Ever. Despite my vast experience, I mean, at last at doing nothing, I was far more qualified than almost anyone I know, but enforced doing nothing, rather than my prototypical autodidact self-guided wasting masses of time doing nothing, ultimately, became exhausting. However, because exhausted is the new normal, Getting Ready For Nothing, every day, was something I managed alright after a fashion. But, how was it for you?
Whatever your answer, here is the really good news. I have a surprise for you and I am about to immediately spoil it with details of this surprise so you don’t get the max percentage of pleasure is anticipation thing, at least not for long… For a school assignment a while ago, my daughter, L’il Champion, (no she never ever refers to herself as such and would be wholly embarrassed by the mere notion), created this faux Constable-Shakespeare mash up video and I borrowed it wholesale for Getting Ready For Nothing. Now... You can win a date with the video stars, although they don’t know it yet. It’s more than a date, you can actually own the stars of the video. I am trading these good folks like goods and chattels but… You are going to have to visit the outsideleft instagram page to win them. I know, right, already more of a challenge than most of us can withstand. But it really is simple. Be the first to message the name of any one of the stars to outsideleft, and it can be yours. For good. Once I find them, they will be mailed out. There are some rules but my long term partner in these types of crime, Jason Lewis, is sorting all that out. And that’s it. Be the first to name them and like magic they will come to you. From Instagram.
Meanwhile since I have nothing better to do, I have decided, to mostly universal hilarity, it feels, to style my hair after the great, great arts chatterer, Will Gompertz. This is not proving to be easy, so I will say no more about it for now. Well, just a little more. There are positives, not so many that they would amount to more than several. I get to spend the entire 2020 Ancient Champion streaming royalties on Salon of Paris shampoo and scalp conditioner hair product. Otherwise in these early stages I can only say, imagine Wolverine if he shaved a strip out of the middle of his hair but kept the sides upturned. Imagine Mike, that Flock of Seagulls guy doing the same thing. A sight for sore eyes. Imagine that and you’re getting there.
Then Frank Worthington died. His hair, like his football career, was significant. Damn, he was one of the good ones, on and off the park, as they say.
Oh well. Gonna happen, gonna go and watch black midi videos as a family. That's what we do.
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