Saturday, May 12th, 2001

Pete Townshend puts up mp3's of "Ascendance (rough mix 2)" and "I've Had Enough (orchestral overdub)" on his website

The weather here in London has suddenly become hot. I am in my studio finalizing the last few pieces of music for Scoop 3 and every hour I have to go out to stand in the garden and be amazed by the fact that summer has finally come to this recently bludgeoned island.

There seem to be two young, pretty topless women in my swimming pool. Am I really a rock star or what?

While scrabbling through various old tapes, (which are old enough to need baking in a slow oven before they can even be listened to), I have come across two tracks I thought you might like to hear.

The first is a dry studio mix of a track I did for a 1983 WOMAD album (Peter Gabriel's World Music foundation). This has me on Hurdy-Gurdy, as well as doing hundreds of tribal drum and vocal overdubs. The interesting thing about the sound is that we left the stereo mikes set up in a single position and moved the drums and vocalists (me) to a new position for each take. So you really get the feeling of a room full of drummers. The words of the 'song' are jibberish, made up of a weird concoction of latin, Spanish and Italian. The punchline is 'Pacifico Musica!'.I think that means 'peaceful music'?

The second is a recording from the studio floor of the rather out-of-tune orchestra overdubbing some invigorating stuff for the Quadrophenia film soundtrack. These strings were not used in the movie. Recently there has been talk of a release of the movie on DVD with a new 5.1 surround sound mix. I started to look for additional stuff and found this wonderful piece of writing by Raphael Rudd.

Enjoy. Ride in your car with the sound full up, listen to the hillbilly strings and drive your car - to the car-wash.

Webcam photo caption: "Hello. I'm in my study. It is Saturday evening on the 12th May 2001. 0655 UK time. The sun is still hot. I am about to walk my dogs".