losing pianos

i mourn your passing, beautiful piano,
though flawed and broken, you were the soul of this place,
you breathe out and you breathe in,
your hammers fail to sound on some your strings,
you fiercely resist tuning...
 
yesterday, after work, and after tate modern, (great video installation there, people on tube trains..), i got the number 17 outside st pauls heading home, but got off early @ the church by chancery lane that i've been checking out for years now,

i found out about st ethelreda's on ely place from a friend back when i was working doing telephone fundraising for charities. this guy (who's copy of anti-oedipus is still in my possession i'm slightly ashamed to say), told me about the oldest catholic church in london. i went and found it and found that in the crypt, or basement, with fantastic stained glass windows in greens and blues, there was a grand piano.

fairly recently moved to london as i was then, i was looking for pianos in the public domain that i could play, this one was special. (as in special schools). it was a bit trashed. certain notes didn't play, the tuning was pretty mad, it was like learning to improvise all over again, what notes work, what notes don't, building up that physical knowledge in your fingers... in such a fantastic space.

i guess i must have stopped going there so often after i stopped that work, but i kept going more and more infrequently, (just like my visits to the leather lane bagel bakery, or top nosh, also local to that area, right up my street foodwise, lovely people). then at some point last year, probably around this time, i found the church again, after an absence of who knows how long... i took S there once when she was pregnant with grace. a nearby french restaurant had taken over the basement and there were often events going on in there, it was a little harder to just stroll in and start playing, but i kept it up. i remember i visited it when i was writing on my mind last autumn. gradually it was moving away from a strange space that i'd found where i could be on my own, to a more public space, involved in commerce,...

so anyway, i strolled in yesterday and it seemed to be right back where it had been, maybe i just caught it at a good moment, completely dark but for these beautiful stained glass windows, coloured light making it seem not just subterranean but under water. so it took me a moment to realise that the piano had gone. i looked around the whole space, my eyes getting used to the dark, no piano. i started to sing, the first line of the words above...

so i'm in bereavement.

but there's other stuff at play too, some of which i want to express in this song. the piano going immediately made me start singing. in that space. that feeling of voicelessness i get at parties when guitars come out, got to such a pitch that i sang. voiceless? fuck that! i have a voice.

and this relates also to the festival, one central event at which was that after i'd got there, met the stage manager (lovely man - G), the sound engineer, lovely vibe in general from that main stage, wandered about abit, met S's friend pony who runs the small world stage, lovely talk about acoustic music feedback, piano's, sorted out a gig for my stuff... after all this loveliness, opening my keyboard case back at the main stage...

and my sound module was not there.

which means that my keyboard was useless (no sounds in at all, voiceless)...

which was a dark space to be in let me tell you.

so the gig had to happen, i borrowed a keyboard from someone, we did the gig, all fine and dandy, but i couldn't lug someone else's keyboard to the small world stage,...

that night after a fair few of mexico's finest magic mushrooms it became apparent to me that i had to play the small world stage. midnight - naked in rainwater. no choice, so i borrowed an accordion from A (kesha), lay down in a field and reaquainted myself with it, wrote out the chords for L & P (bass & guitar), had to really persuade P that he could play the guitar, halucinogens having battered him too.. S was right there playing percussion...

and you know it happened, it had to happen so it did happen. 4 tunes, silly games, citysick, beranice & midnight. citysick was deeply wrong and the audience just didn't give us any applause in that very democratic way, but the others worked, i was a little clumsy on the accordean but the gig happened and that was enough for me... went off and got all shamanic, entering the loose festical vibe once, maybe a few more stories from that later,

my point here again is the response to the voice going. the music forcing it's way through other channels.

mourning the loss of that voice but moving forward nonetheless with what you've got. the latest twist for me being now i'm home i still haven't found that sound module, the possibility that i left it @ the spitz on the 4th... only a possibility at this stage, but hardcore, both there, the mourning of that thing, along with the underwater spring forcing its way through.... poetic times.

x