Godzilla at the Hackney Picturehouse

Went to see this last night, I recommend it! Watched it on a small screen in 3D. I always enjoy 3D for the first 20 mins and then totally forget it's in 3D, my brain just takes it into account.

We walked from Dalston Junction to Mare Street on the way over, along Dalston Lane so I could point out to Jess where the band rehearses. I haven't written about the band yet: basically we rebooted last November after spending three years as a project-y collective very much oriented to recording music on computers. We didn't play live, we couldn't actually play live as I was on both vocal and bass duty and can't physically do both at the same time. We all got a bit fed up with that, it was just a lot of sitting in front of computers and fiddling with music software, and of course we all became bad at our instruments because we weren't playing in a room together very often. So in November I moved to lead guitar and vocals, the rhythm guitarist moved to bass and the lead guitarist moved to a sort of rhythm/lead hybrid. We brought in a guy we know from our old school on drums and we rehearse once a week (annoyingly, on Mondays, which often leads to the "Test Match Special" of drinking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights). We have six songs and hope we can start playing live soon, just some little gigs in bars would be fun, e.g. the Bird's Nest in Deptford if they will have us. Like a New Jersey bar band, kind of, but sounding like Pavement. But most of all I've just really enjoyed actually playing songs live in the rehearsal room, drinking the obligatory Red Stripe and making a racket, feeling ourselves get tighter and tighter at the songs through practice. It's like the difference between working out every day and doing a token run once a fortnight, I guess.

We're losing a little bit of momentum lately - basically when you write a song in a (our) band:

• Writing the first 25% feels great, that's the eureka moment where something clicks 
• The next 25% is quite fun as you improvise and elaborate around the original idea in a loose, non-committal way
• The next 25% where you start to hone it down is harder work but still satisfying, you are using your experience and musicianship
• The remaining 25% is then just suddenly a massive ball ache, you disagree a lot more at this stage, little niggling problems just seem impossible to fix (and there might be disagreement about whether a 'part not quite working' is because of the part, or because other people in the band are not playing it properly), and often the original thing that got you all clicking in the first 25% has been changed or no longer has the same impact in the context of the rest of the song and everyone's just a bit tired of it. 

Anyway - we've reached the final 25% on a lot of the songs, and are kind of going in circles. Worryingly, not because we are at each other's throats about how long the solo should be etc., but because everyone is kind of shying away from taking the initiative on pushing forward their ideas for the final 25%, there's a lot of displacement activity. We're a bit older, we just want to have some fun and pursue our own personal musical thing, there's a danger that our relative lack of youthful hunger might see us run out of steam. It definitely felt a bit more vital two months ago, I was actually looking forward to practices for days in advance.

our rehearsal room in Dalston

Speaking of displacement activity, I had no intention of writing this much about the band when I started this post. I have to skip to the end now! I was going to do a whole elegiac thing about walking to Shoreditch High Street via London Fields and Broadway Market and feeling myself come detached from London. But anyway on the way up to the film, we hatched a secret provisional plan to move to Bath at the end of August. We might change our minds so don't tell anyone, we don't want to look stupid. Me and Jess are really bad at announcing plans and then scrapping them. But we will make the final decision on August 1, when we decide whether to give notice on our flat. I have to stress again that this is a secret for now and may change, I'm not supposed to tell anyone but I don't see how I could continue to write this blog without getting it out there, the blog is obviously part of the process getting me there. Don't tell anyone. Especially my mum, she'd be devastated if she thought we were moving and then we didn't. Maybe next week I'll write a blog post about why I changed my mind and am staying in London. This is how rolling news works!

But the job market out there looks reasonably healthy. For some reason the idea of working in comms - even, horror of horrors, for a PR agency - doesn't seem to bother me if it's in Bath or Bristol. I suddenly feel much more relaxed about everything: money, work, the future, everything. My wife can get a dog and I can get a Bath City FC season ticket.

People from Bath joke about it being "the graveyard of ambition". Die without perishing!!