Zama, zama. Let’s go for it, in Zulu. Gone. Top right wisdom tooth, extracted. He froze the gum and pushed and tugged and wrenched for some time. Loosened this villain, rocked it and wobbled it and pulled and tugged again and again. I relax through pain and this sort of business. All muscles slump and I turn off my mind, until good thoughts emerge from the quiet darkness. I was taken dreamily through images and thoughts of a Southport hotel balcony where I was inspired at sunset and wrote two songs for the new album there and then, before, during and after dinner. And, more airily, I strolled on sandy beaches imagining painting my masterpiece. Now that is a dream. And the kids came by in this reverie, with jobs and a safe future. Now that really is a dream. Many thoughts passed by as he tugged and rocked and wrenched that wisdom tooth out of my head. Big, he said. Bizarre, too, he said. It’s got three roots instead of the usual one. Yes, it was infected recently and I ’ll be better off without it. Gone.

About that tooth. Check-up with dentist. The top-right wisdom is the problem. Lower two extracted many years ago, so the villain has grown a little longer than normal, much longer than had it been grinding down on another. Hence, it is loose and became infected last week with extraneous nonsense lodged in all the wrong places. Extraction today. And I have a horror of hypodermics. He swears I will hardly notice it being done. “A little pushing and pulling.....” Pain I can take. But needles. Needles I fear.

Slightly shattered. Ten tracks recorded, some sung, others waiting for lyrics. It’s like jet-lag. Coming down from the mad rushes of adrenalin that go with the producing/recording process. Been living-in at a residential recording studio. Odd to get up and share breakfast with the band. Odd, too, to share the dinner table each night, but they are all decent blokes and easy to get along with. I’m the one with the swimming head, tunes and words, production plans all juggled at the same time, so I’m the distant one over the boiled eggs and soldiers. Home for a few days, then to Germany, so the rush will re-start, and I’ll be all the better for it. Playing Live, that’s still number one for me. Berlin beckons and then on-the-road with the same decent blokes. Could be much worse, I know.

Read about Facebook unleashing freedom to steal identities, and how the Royal family had registered their names so no thieving cybersquatter could do so. Thought I’d best do same. Now I don’t have a clue what to do with it. I know I don’t want to twitter nonsense with near or complete strangers, so I imagine the site will lie there, dormant. Same with MySpace. The Imposter has been seen off , we’ve registered another and there it lies, dormant too. What do you do with Facebook? Has the word “friend” been somewhat devalued by tagging it to strangers who look you up?

Read somewhere, taking a late night pause from writing, trawling the web like a first-year student at a loose end, that someone (maybe in The Guardian?) was of the opinion that I was neither a cockney, nor a rebel. Occurred to me that Neil Young was neither crazy, nor a horse. Only wish I’d read the piece when it was printed.

Took a couple of weeks away from the study, but didn’t take a guitar. And I regretted it badly.
Thought Mahon, main city of Menorca, would have a decent music shop or two, but the only one was closed for its own holidays.

Now Michael Jackson has been taken, probably at the hands of careless Californian physicians of low morals and expensive habits.

Where were we? Oh yes. Flawed genius.

Looking For Eric. Flawed genius. Flawed expression. Every Genius is flawed. And all genius is flawed. By its very nature, the wayward mind, the extraordinary imagination of the greatest artists, entrepreneurs, inventors and sportsmen, is flawed. It cannot be anything else: not ordinary; never stable, and impossibly exasperating. Read Eliot and take your time. Research the allegories and the allusions to obscure, arcane Greek literature and myth. Cantona, Zidane, Best and Maradonna. Michelangelo, Picasso, Stubbs and Turner; Darwin, Einstein, Gates and Hawking; Fosse, Prince, Rogers and Hart; Bernstein, Epstein, Faraday and Wilde; Lawrence, Shakespeare, Steinbeck and Hemingway. Think Hemingway’s rare gift for story-telling in the narrative. Think the shortest short story to grace literature’s annals: For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn. Charlie Scribner prize winner. Saw this quoted recently in a broadsheet. Misquoted, actually. After each pair of words, Hemingway carefully, meticulously, pedantically, placed a point. Not a comma, as in the paper’s poor quote. But a full stop. Each pair represents a third of the story. It had, according to Scribner’s rules, to have a beginning, a middle and an end. So points it was. Full stops. Hemingway was a Genius. But he blew his head off once he realised he’d never find the ultimate answer. Flawed, then. Not superman, merely a Genius. Such a gift must be a burden.

ChildLine Rocks rocked. Jon Lord is a friendly chap. A cool and unaffected sort of guy. He played a clever set with Steve Balsami singing to the Lord Hammond B3. They travel to European cities, just the two of them, and meet there with a full orchestra and rock band, comprised of local players, rehearse for a day and then play big cross-over concerts to 3,000 or so people. I thought it all sounded a little nerve-wracking, like arriving to find your backside has gone south for the winter, as the leader calls the first beats. Jon Lord is made of the sort of stuff that makes a man a man, for all tha’. No, he said, it’s exciting. And I understood: the adventure, the gamble, the risks all make it worthwhile. And it probably seldom, if ever, fails to score. Thunder played like the virtuosi of aol rock that they are. My new agent, Danny Bowes, has an amazing vocal range. I hope he proves to be as convincing and sensational an agent as he is singer. To Bury St Edmunds (not praise it.....), for Battle Of The Bands, held in the Abbey grounds. Gave up a place in a box at Epsom Downs for the Derby. Giving back, I guess it’s known as! Some school/college age fellows played (no females in any of the 5 bands) 15 minute sets, and all, ALL, thrashed it with electric guitars, riffing like the 60s their own dads can only barely remember. It shocked me. I wanted melody and harmony, and I got unison thrash. I expected and hoped for Coldplay, The Killers, Elbow. I got Uriah Heep and The Edgar Broughton Band in short trousers.

This website has been up for a few years now. Met with Webmaster Andy Fearon recently, and a complete (and I mean complete!) re-vamp has begun. Andy reckons the new site, all inter-action and bells and whistles, should be ready for unveiling later in the summer. I am something of a technophobe, but Andy made it all sound very swish, elaborate and more than a little exciting, even to me. To Spain, to visit the old dad. Found a cool restaurant with good, serious cuisine. Always thought nobody would move to Spain for the food. Best meals I’ve had when out with family there have been Indonesian or Bulgarian (maybe Croatian, certainly east Euro). Finally found the decent one - in the Costa Blanca town where they live, at least. Great night with my brother Nigel, who my sister calls my “little buddy”. Can’t see why really, he’s a big ole boy. But my buddy, nonetheless. Proud to say so. His partner, Derek, is one of the best companions, too. They like a bit of banter, exchanges of opinion, without taking the Nice umbrage, common among my family. I like debate, banter and even argument, but a lifetime travelling with musicians who take no prisoners makes it the only way to get by. Greta missed the trip (the boy and his fab partner came with us); she’d already got a week at Boot Camp in Norfolk in the diary. Tough week, that. Very tough. But she completed and we are proud of her. She’s a softie at heart, so maybe Boot Camp and its RSM style routines have made a bit of a man of her (just kidding, girls).