Delays, delays!

The worst thing about moving isn’t the packing and disruption to an otherwise orderly life, its the lawyers and accountants. At present we are held up on my side because a state-approved accountancy firm are trying to charge me $53,000 for what my own accountant has calculated to be 24 minutes work! On the other side the buyer is having to wait weeks while another accountancy firm sets up a company for him. This is part of the reason I’m leaving France - the French. It is no surprise that bureaucracy is a French word. A bigger surprise is that entrepreneur is also a French word. There can’t be many of those round here with these kind of charges and delays on the simplest of commercial transactions.

I’m reading “The Sea” by John Banville, which won the Man Booker prize. I’m reading it very very slowly because of the way he uses words and constructs sentences so beautifully. I don’t care about the story. It’s like listening to a song because you like the words but indifferent to the tune, or more likely vice versa, most words to pop songs being unadulterated tripe. Every page throws up a gem. I read another book recently on how to read books. In a chapter on how to choose books the author came up with a great suggestion which is when you’re in the bookshop turn to page 69 of any book that has taken your fancy and if you like what you read buy it, and of course if you don’t don’t. Here is the last sentence of page 69 of “The Sea”.

” Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.”

A lovely thought, even more delightful if you hear it spoken in your head in a soft Irish brogue.

My equal best Irish mate is coming to live in LA too. Colin Devlin, of The Devlins, a fantastic Dublin-based rock band, has just finished recording his first solo album in Montreal with producer Pierre Marchand, who also produces Sarah McLaughlin. I heard many of the tracks as demos and they are fantastically good. Listen to their last band album “Doves” to get a taste. Colin has a unique voice, something between a whisper and a moan. Captivating. He put me on to a great Irish vocal coach, Tine Verbike, who stayed with me for 3 weeks the summer before last to help me improve my vocals. She saved Bono’s voice when he buggered up his vocal chords on the Zooropa tour. She left me a one hour coaching lesson on my iPod which I follow every day (just in case you’re reading this Tine!)  religiously. No honestly!

All my band are Irish. They were brought together by my other equal best Irish mate Dave Browne, who too has just finished his first solo album, after a career as front man  for cult Irish rock group Picturehouse. He also co-produced my debut album “Songs For Sale”. He is one of the most connected people in Dublin. Everywhere you go there people say hello to him. Its like he owns the place! He’s a fantastic musician, as are all my band. They will be the feature of a whole new blog one a whole new day. The lovely thing about musicians is that they are generally lovely people. They have to be because music is such a collaborative activity, and intense too if you’re doing it right. Nobody wants to work with a jerk. Anyway with that thought I’m off to eat. Bye for now!

Hello world!

This is my first blog and my last Sunday in the house I’ve lived in for nearly 10 years. From next Friday I am (temporarily) homeless. I am leaving my home near Cannes on the French Cote d’Azur to start a new life in Los Angeles, a city I know well and love. Hardly anybody you meet in LA comes from there. It’s a place people go either to get something or to get away from something somewhere else. In my case both things apply. I’m leaving France to get away from a place I’ve become bored with. Fractious neighbors. A lost love. A house far too big for my needs as a (newly) single man. I’m going to LA to start a new life, as an internet entrepreneur, rock musician, and photographer.

In truth the change sounds bigger than it is. I am the owner of the .LA internet address, with a large and fast-growing customer base in southern California (see www.la). I’ve recently launched my debut album “Songs For Sale” by my band GTA, three years in the making (www.gta.la). Finally my photographic works, images of subversive slogans and graffiti from around the world, are now available on a new website (www.ga.la). In short, I have a lot of things to sell, and believe there are lots of potential buyers in LA, and moreover in the US at large. It’s El Dorado time!

Speaking of things to sell I have sold just about everything I own over the last few weeks. I decided a few months ago that I needed a catharsis, which became a tidying-up, which then turned into a wholesale clear-out. House, furniture, cars (oh, my beloved Mustang GT convertible), paintings, sculptures (including one 12ft high and another weighing 14 tons!) - all gone. All my remaining possessions now fit into a cube of less than 3m, mainly guitars, hi-fi, books, artworks, and clothes. It feels fantastic! A few years ago a lovely lady journalist did a lifestyle piece on me for the Sunday Telegraph magazine in the UK. After shadowing me for a few days and hearing me moaning about the upkeep of the huge garden, servicing of the cars, security systems, even the number of guests I entertained, she said “You know, you never really own things, they own you”. I now understand what she meant. I feel liberated!

I’ve visited LA many times over the last seven years, since acquiring .LA, and have a good base of friends there. I used to stay at an seaside apartment in Santa Monica, belonging to Simon Climie, formerly one half of proto Wham! boy-band Climie Fisher and now Grammy Award-winning music producer and co-writer with Eric Clapton. However since his gorgeous and talented fiance Nicki moved in there I stay at the Four Seasons Beverley Hills, which has become a home from home. I met Simon through English singer-songwriter Julia Fordham and I met Julia through her sister Claire, who has written one of the funniest books I’ve read on LA culture, called “Plus One, Diary of a Hollywood Nobody”. They were friends with Michael Brook, who produced one of Julia’s albums, and recently wrote the soundtrack for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and even more recently Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”. Michael is my best friend in LA and a few weeks ago took me to Paramount studios to see a private promotional gig by Eddie Vedder, formerly lead man with Pearl Jam, performing an acoustic set of the 5 new songs he wrote for the movie. He was brilliant, modest, and charming - an unusual combination in a heavy-metal rock god - and like many other rock giants (Bono and Roger Daltrey come to mind) he was tiny.

In his 50’s Michael has become a father for the first time, a baby boy Felix. On his recent tour his then pregnant young wife Julie, a concert violinist, was headlined as “others”, as in “Michael Brook plus Special Guest Rich Evans and Others” She was the only Other. They live in the Hollywood Hills near the Capitol Records Tower, an architectural landmark built in 1956, the year of my birth, designed by Welton Becket. It was the worlds first circular office building, designed to evoke a stack of 45rpm records on a turntable. The blinking light on the top of the spike on the tower spells out “Hollywood” in Morse Code. It was ceremonially turned on by Lyla Morse, the grand-daughter of Sam Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code. The building has been digitally “destroyed” twice in the movies. The first time by an earthquake in the eponymous 1974 disaster blockbuster, and again by a massive tornado in “The Day After Tomorrow”. Ironically it looks like the industry it once housed is about to be destroyed by digital downloads.

So, back to the packing. I’ll be out of here by Thursday then off to London, then New York, and then LA by the end of the month. Hope you enjoyed this first installment and all the best.