(away the) crow road - 'you may bury my body down by the highway side so my old evil spirit can catch a greyhound bus and ride'

the wonderful internet (the gift that keeps on giving) has returned another one of horsemouth's endeavours to him - crow road a track by pressure of speech from the early 90ies on which there's a bare smidgen of his guitar playing (in a slide-y blues-y style). pressure of speech were essentially micky mann, although various other people were involved at various times (andy james, luke losey, dj stikka). micky's inspiration (or so he said at the time) was a childhood prank in scotland involving climbing up into a tree in the middle of a rookery with his mates then letting fly with catapults and bangers until the whole colony was in uproar.



horsemouth's inspiration, in responding to the track, was less adventurous. less experiential (or indeed phenomenological) and more literary.

 'You may bury my body,  down by the highway side ooh, So my old evil spirit, can catch a Greyhound bus and ride' 

sang robert johnson on 'me and the devil blues' - this is the inspiration for horsemouth's blues-y noodling. to horsemouth roads were important in this song because of the expression for death in iain bank's novel the crow road 'he's away the crow road' (this was what he assumed micky was on about - such is the cast of horsemouth's mind). micky had a synthesizer sample that sounded like a crow cawing and by scrapping the strings horsemouth could make a similar cawing noise (but more multiple crows rather than crow) - one of horsemouth's early guitar heroes was adrian belew, a guitarist who claimed not to be influenced by other guitarists but only by zoo animals and spent a lot of time working out how to make animal noises on the guitar - see l'elephant, lone rhinocerous etc.. this is horsemouth's contribution to this genre.

while horsemouth is confessing his guitar for hire activities during the years of rave his high point was probably being sampled for lush3-1 by orbital - he comes in at 2.58 under some double time high-hats - his inspiration here was his brief studies with folo graff of orchestre jazira at jenako arts in hackney (god bless the LEA, floodlight and adult education in general). horsemouth was a big fan of the interlocking, layered guitars in african music and wanted to use that to make something my life in the bush of ghosts like. nobody else was very keen. for attempting to invent brooklyn afrobeat in hackney in the 1990ies horsemouth's band was soundly spanked - did he say spanked? he meant ignored.


he has to say orbital made his guitar sound amazing but it's a very subtle part and the tune probably doesn't need it.

there were a few other things connecting pressure of speech and bush house (terrible name) horsemouth's band - the tracks x-beats and x-on from the first album art of the state derived from mixes micky had done of a bush house song exxon valdez - it was a good tune, horsemouth co-wrote it with ross (mostly) round the guitar part - maybe he should try saving it from the jaws of history. of course micky's mixes are entirely his.
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horsemouth went out to see richard youngs play at the balfron tower community cabin. he kind of expected to see people he knew demonstrating against this sort of thing on a platform of keep chrisp street crap (then no-one will want to come here and it won't get gentrified and we can carry on living here). a much more realiseable platform than keep hackney crap horsemouth feels.

richard youngs horsemouth has seen before (john clarkson reminded him) at st. pancras old church - there he claimed to have not enough song to do the performance and played it all over again. what horsemouth mainly admires about him is his crowd control (ok he has an interesting voice too) but like david thomas broughton his main interest seems to be playing with audience expectations/ performance conventions.

it was all too much for one young man who invited him to fuck off at the end (before stomping out). the other lot on tom james scott (as a duo) made a very nice series of drones, pluckings with some cassette players a guitar an autoharp and some hand bells.

when it was over himself and john wandered up the blackwall tunnel approach to the gentrifier's arms in search of that craft beer (he's hooked). horsemouth has done two weeks off - he'll probably go back to being good for a week or two longer (err. tomorrow). this morning horsemouth is a little headachey. tonight he goes to a birthday.