Star Blog

I write this while sitting in Costa at Paddington Station, feeling very metrosexual as I sit here sipping (gulping) double espresso, wielding my Berry and tossing around with the inhouse internet connection. This is what happens to you when you find yourself going backwards and forwards to London for 'meetings' for days in a row. Thankfully this one was an in-out job but it's still eaten up the best part of the afternoon. Hence the accompaniment of my trusty old laptop. I never do this usually but this time I really do have to work on the go, intent as I am on nailing this here book type thing I'm apparently locked into come what may. You can tell it's made my head go funny though. Just now I found myself watching a video on Youtube on Venom from about 1984 doing Welcome To Hell. No, wait come back...

Have spent the last 24 hours on the town. Sort of. Dante Bonutto came over last night and we went out to dinner at the Old Post Office. Talked turkey. Dante works for Universal now and I... well, I do whatever it is I do. We've also known each other for nearly 30 years, all the way back to Kerrang, which he gave me my first shot at and, so, lots to jaw about. He left about 2.00a.m.

Another weekend that left me too weak ended to manage to blog. Same old, same new. Saturday I worked. Right up to about 4pm when eldest daughter reminded me I'd promised her daddy-and-daughter time. With three kids this daddy-and- thing seems never-ending. In fact, it's a good three weeks or so since eldest and I did this. "Where are we going?" she asked, an expectant look on her face, complete bafflement on mine. It was already dark outside. "Oxford," I said boldly. "Oxford? But won't the shops all be closed?" Absolutely not, I assured her. "Oxford never sleeps! Not on a Saturday anyway. Not most of it anyway..."

Had a feeling this day wasn't going to be gold but I was wrong. Was up til nearly 1.30a.m. interviewing someone on the phone in Australia. All good but boy was I crackered by the time I had to go again at 7.a.m. Wife and I had a meeting with our boy's teacher. He's a star and she's good too, just something that needed to be sorted out, a communication issue, as they say. By the time we were out walking the dogs in the ice cold sun, I was tired. From the legs up. Wife suggested I grab a little power nap when we got back but I was itching to get going again on the AC/DC book. Not always a good idea when the brain is choked with cobwebs but today somehow it really worked. Like peering at it from behind glass eyes, it somehow made the whole thing much easier. Sometimes when you;re tired, it works in your favour as a writer, you simply don't have the patience for the usual crap and easily discard what you don't need - one of the hardest, most time consuming aspects of trying to write a book. Not today, baby. Bish, bash and bosh, job's a good un. Then after the kids came home from school we went out for a pub supper in Crowmarsh and I drank a pint and a half of IPA, the jolly green g-man. Bosh, bash, bish. Made even the chewy sirloin taste edible (almost). Now we're home again, it's Friday eve, kids are upstairs watching a DVD and wife is in the next room flirting with her boyfriends on Facebook, and I'm wondering whatever happened to Noel from Split Enz. Knew those boys back in 80/81, toured with them, was asked to write a book about them which I never did, even invited to emigrate to Melbourne to work for their manager Nathan, which back then was like being invited to join a colony on Mars. Great group, the Enz. Neil and I were the same age and became instant road buddies. It couldn't last though as I didn't know how to make that sort of thing happen back then. He did all right, though, I think.

I'd been dead before of course, found either face down in the pool or vomiting all over myself in the back of a car. Then there was the time I climbed aboard that prop-plane and the coked-out pilot ploughed it straight into the house. Boom, out go the lights. The time some little fuck popped out of my hair just shot me in the chest. Once I'd actually drowned in the bath while my so-called girlfriend lay passed out in the next room. Another time sat on the toilet, my sparkly white flares round my ankles. Once I'd even passed away in my sleep, 32 and no direction home. Always though, whatever the circumstances, it was the same scene. The weeping wet groupies. The so-called friends all crawling out of the woodwork like any of them ever knew shit about fuck. Sometimes they said I'd faked it. Well, obviously. Other times that someone had done me in deliberately, as part of the Great Plan. Always with the big mysteries. When the truth, as always, was sitting there hiding in plain sight. It was just my time. I'd been asking for it and asking for it. Daring it to happen. Then one day, big surprise, it did. I'd always leave a tune or two behind, though. Something to remember me by and get all warped and distilled about. Always a pro, right to the end. Again.

One of those days where you've got it all worked out in advance, only to find hours later nothing has quite gone as planned and you aren't even back where you started but in a whole other place, not necessarily bad or wrong, just... not what was planned. I was going to spend the heart of today getting some much-needed transcribing done on the AC/DC book. Seven hours later I'm still here waiting to get started, the time having been eaten away by emails, phone calls, and a visit from the Sky guy who just installed Sky Plus under the new giving-it-away deal, and made our previously HD-ready TV, now fully loaded. There was also that trip to the coffee shop for much-needed poison to keep my eyes open, then that suddenly urgent need for food. Then... well, you get something of the picture. The good news, though, being I am doing two more phone interviews tonight for the book. Which I will of course transcribe eagerly. Tomorrow.

So the Loutallica album has been a great big flop commercially. Does that make it a failure or a success? Well, if you're a mainstream metal fan, who sees the performance of his favourite bands as like following a football team and therefore needs the validation of chart domination, then clearly this counts as major failure.

Well, that was different. Wife and I went to bed last night leaving eldest daughter and her friend, who was having a sleepover, alone downstairs to do... anything they liked, really, as long as it didn't make noise or frighten the horses. And it worked! They were good as gold - at least as far as we know anyway.

"Come in," he said, "We've been expecting you."

You climb up, sit there trying to admire the view then crash back down again, sometimes further than where you started. But then as the Cheeky Girls put it so poetically, touch my bum, this is life. Sitting here wallowing in Nina Simone's Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair, while browsing through a pre-publication copy of the Foruli bells-and-whistles edition of the Bill Bruford book. I'm no Bruford expert but I know a good, cracked voice when I read one. I bet he's good company if you can suffer past the first 30 minutes and have something in a handy glass to help ease your pain and his.

After seeing Vanessa and her magic needles yesterday was in bed and snoring by 10pm last night. Consequently was full of energy today. Sitting down to work, getting up again without groaning too loudly, walking dogs and typing, typing, typing. Was planning to repeat the pattern tonight but the telly got me first, the BBC2 doc of Agent Zigzag followed by Ep1 of Life's Too Short. No wine, though. No, not in this temple-like body, not while I'm building up my strength and fitness again. I see myself in three months time running up hills backwards, munching dandelion leaves for breakfast and writing the great words of one so great. So long as there's nothing good on TV, obviously...

Saw the sainted Vanessa this morning, a week earlier than scheduled. I was feeling the need. Got a lot on and still not quite enough in the tank to manage. AC/DC is suddenly very intense again, wanna get this one done early. Or at the very latest bang on time. And from not really knowing what on Earth anyone actually living on Earth could really say about them, having so little to say about it themselves, I now know exactly where this is going. Have done for a while but now it's so razor clear I'm very tempted to start shuffling the pieces around like scenes from Pulp Fiction. Like one of their one-riffs, you don't need to be held by the hand, you just need to get straight to the action, deep in the night, hardly any explanation needed at all, at least not of the conventional kind. I mean let's just let it all hang out, right?

Went out four times yesterday, about three times more than is to my usual liking on a Saturday. The first time was to spend Daddy and Son time with my youngest. Had a stroll around Wallingford, where wife was visiting the sainted Vanessa. Popped into the weekly local produce market, as you do, where we bought some lamb, culled from the actual woolly friends I'm always passing with the dogs, and some handmade choccies I was seduced into paying over the odds for by an evil man in white gloves. Big heart-shaped lolly for boy, some milky caramel things for wife and some purely medicinal dark chocolate (good for the heart) and ginger (good for the digestion) chocs for me. Followed by the real purpose of the trip: a Pudsey Bear each for boy and his sisters.

Knackered old day, woke up dead and struggled on from there. Good though, there have certainly been worse. When not doing something that involved kids (getting them to school or back again), dogs (walking feeding putting up with) I was trying to write a review of the new Glenn Hughes book, which is fantastic. Rock book of the year, gotta be. It must be amazing to own one of the Deluxe edition numbers that go for £550 but somehow I've not been able to persuade Joel McIver who wrote the book with Glenn to see me right there. As it is, the access-all-wallets version on Jawbone has been keeping me entertained all week. I advise anyone who cares to put it on Santa's special list at once.

What a day night day. Met my soul sister Maureen Rice for lunch at Joe's in Covent Garden. According to Maureen it was three years since we'd last done this. Surely this cannot be true. Time is a filthy rotten scoundrel. She was looking good though, actually younger and more relaxed than the last time I saw her and she was no wreck then. I always make the most of seeing Maureen, not just because it's too rarely but because she really is like the sister I never had, a family member, though god knows what she'd want to be in my family for. Her dad and my dad were big boozing buddies back in the very long dark day, two paddy boys on the craic, 24-7. Weird to think that's where we came from. Anyway, we've both traveled an even longer road since then, making it somehow to this other side of the road unscarred. Or at least not that you would notice at first.

Strange, monkey ass kind of day. Woke up at 2.00a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. Eventually came downstairs and sat here reading the TLS til nearly 4.30, at which point I fell into a good deep sleep - just in time to be woken by the alarm.

Had another Daddy and Daughter time today, this time with the younger of the two. Same place I took the oldest earlier this week, Wallingford, but a different scene. Being a Saturday the local produce market was on and I took her round to see all the stalls, organic this, home-made that. Ended up buying flapjacks, ginger oat cakes, black beauty apply chutney, a loaf of unsliced bread and a pair of hand-knitted finger-less gloves for wife. And then we went into Wallingford Books where I sat on the floor while daughter took her time finding a couple of books to take home with her. They are very cool and welcoming in WB. One of the women behind the counter came out with all sorts of books the girl might like. Then the other woman that took the dough also made a fuss. A nice trip, on every level. Daughter was chatting away, telling me things. Then I told her some things of my own. The kids are all so nice to go out with on their own, although boy still tends to kamikaze around a fair bit. It's only when you try and take all three anywhere that the madness grips.

Was sitting here today perusing the new Tight But Loose, reading about Jimmy and Donovan and the Crowes etc - Lewis has done it again, bless him - when I felt moved to dig out some Zep. Went for the Presence album, still one of my least favourites, and so it remains, but by god it does have its moments. Cathedral-like sound, juddering sense of proportion, weird kind of anti-confidence, defiance I suppose in the face of imminent collapse. Rock bands simply don't make coming-over-the-trenches albums like that anymore, where the album truly reflects the reality of the participants' lives, good and bad. It may not be the first Zep album you'd play someone who'd never actually sat through a Zep album and wanted to know what all the fuss is about, but it is still a masterpiece, a one-off. No wonder Jimmy is still so proud of it.

Had a visit today from my mate Harry Paterson, went to lunch at the Old Post Office. Told some war stories to each other. We've been doing this via email and FB for a while, good finally to put an eyeball to a face to an upturned mind. His, anyway. I was encouraging him to do some more mainstream music mag writing. As someone who began by writing political pieces in the Weekly Worker he's certainly got the word skills. And considering his deep background in rock and metal (and prog and more) he absolutely has the taste for the good stuff. So far though he's been writing for the cool websites and outsider music mags. And so he should continue. I just think the mainstream numbers could also use that kind of vision and writerly craft.

Picked eldest daughter up from school yesterday and took her out for some Daddy-Daughter time. Wife reckons she has been feeling neglected by me lately, saying I don't treat her as nice as I do the other two. I felt she had a point so decided to try and make up for it. Not that I mean to treat her different but she's the oldest and speaking as the oldest of four I know how hard that is. There is 13 years between me and my youngest brother and we had a completely different dad. He looked the same, had the same name but the guy was simply no longer the same by the time my brother came along. To him, my dad was a jovial, friendly old chap who liked a drink and a smoke and telling a dirty joke or two.