outside nature by Simon Aulman
I walked home from Calshot today and for the first four hours the forecast "sunshine and light showers" was actually non-stop rain, often quite heavy. I've never had a washing machine in my life and do it all in the sink and that can encourage you to not rinse your stuff so well and so my clothes frothed a bit today and they are now all drying, unwashed, and the house smells very strange indeed. So much so that I couldn't stand it and so watched the new Nicolas Cage film, which I slept through, though I think it was me and not him, and then I came back here and made this because I wanted to do one thing right today - even though musically I've never done anything right ever.
This album sums up my problem. Listen to that music. No one's going to like that. Okay, I love it. But I'm odd. None of my friends like my music and some are quite rude about it. "Simon you're quite brainy but why do you keep on doing the one thing you have no talent for ?" If I can be bothered, I tell them that this luddite style of music is a dying art - soon AI will do everything, but I don't think the AI will quite get my wheezing and LBC in the musical background quite the way I do.
And then there's the album "cover" - that painting - yes mine - yes this hard-nosed austere uncompromising noisy distorting musician paints like some kitsch horrorman left over from the fronts of Victorian chocolate-boxes. How the hell am I going to get rich and famous if I make music that would shock NWW and SPK and yet paint album covers that would fit in nicely in Goebbel's Exhibition Of Okay Art or over the bedstead of Kim Jong Un ? Sorry, I can't help it. I like distorted music, and I like painting paintings that have blue sky and clouds and pretty flowers.
And I have the wrong friends, because although they hate my music they love my paintings and say I should do more of them. I'm not retired yet and just between me and me I hope I never will be, but if I should ever have a retirement hobby then they hope it will be painting pics like this. They say they'd even buy them, and some people have.
This is not the life I had planned. Almost at the end of it, way too late, I discover what people want. I only ever wanted to be Steve Stapleton, even before we briefly became friends, a thousand years ago, but instead I'm going to end up like Jack Vettriano, just not rich, or anything. Everywhere where I want there to be nothing, I find there is abundance, and vice-v. This morning I had an email from Bandcamp saying Hurrah and telling me I'd got some extra free downloads or something.
At first I thought it was more of those bloody things you send to fans. But what good would that be ? - I'd need some fans first. But no, I later noticed that these freebies are actually just extra free downloads that you get every time you earn another 7p per year and hit the supertax bracket just like me and Elton John, and because no one ever downloads my music anyway I now have about twenty thousand free downloads to go.
I can't get rid of these bloody things. The longer I go on the deeper I get in the quagmire of unwanted-by-anyone free downloads. It's actually quite embarrassing. I feel I'm being laughed at - that poor old bloke, he's made about a thousand albums, we've given him about a million free downloads, no one's ever wanted one, when's he going to get the message and close his Bandcamp account and go over to Etsy and sell his pretty-pretty paintings and get rich and famous ? - but I know that AI has got there already, whereas no one would ever program AI to do what goes on over here - except I do like this album a lot so I shall use one of my free downloads and keep it forever and now it's nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to go.
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recorded this evening, painting by me
