I just went out to a gig. This is slightly unusual for me these days. I went because Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, the rhythm section of The Smiths were in the group, who were called Jason Specter. Alas, they seem to have taken the Oasis route (pretty rocky, vocals yelled), and while the group were very professional and tight, they didn’t impress me all that much. They did get better as the night went on, but I was actually more taken by the band before them, a complete Smiths wannabe band called Sadie. They reminded of me of how I used to be when I was in a band – the singer was singing badly, prancing around the stage to a nice jangly sound etc… Anyway, it was actually really nice to go out to see live music; I should do it more often…

I’ve listened to a lot of music today, and this morning I (sort of) wrote a song. An idea came to me in the shower, and I recorded an extremely rough version of it. I got a very nice tremelo guitar sound out of my amp, so hopefully I can polish it into something soon…

Oh, and concerning ‘not buying any records for a while’, I am a complete bullshitter – on the way home yesterday (I mean Friday) I had some serious record karma. As I was walking down 5th Avenue, I was trying to think of a reason why I shouldn’t pop into Academy Records. I couldn’t think of one, so I headed along 18th St, and then remembered that second hand bookstore across the street which sometimes has $1 records out front. I looked straight ahead and was drawn to a crate which was out front. I knelt down and immediately picked out 2 Ramsey Lewis albums on Cadet – ‘Hang on Ramsey’ and ‘Swingin’. I also (vainly, since my name is Jonny) bought an early 60s vocal record by Bonnie Baker called ‘Oh Johnny!’ with an incredible cover featuring a girl standing up in an open-topped jaguar near a country house, being ravished by some dashing gentleman. Pretty funny. Actually, the album was better than I had expected – it was in great shape and featured a track called ‘the bongo song’, about falling for a guy who plays bongoes in a band – cool, eh! As for the Ramsey Lewis LPs, ‘Hang on Ramsey’ is a live album recorded in 1965. It’s kind of cool, but my $1 copy turned out to be in pretty poor shape. ‘Swingin’ was actually a revelation though – the trio’s first recording (from December 1956; my copy is a 60s reissue), it’s an extremely cool, percussive album, with a lot of cool bass and drums – really pretty unusual to my ears, and not the straight ahead jazz I was expecting from looking at the song titles…