A proper rehearsal today, though no Andy, who is off encountering the psychedelics of Love tonight (the pop group, not the emotion). When one person isn’t at a practice it always seems a little strange, you can hear the gaps where he or she would be. Funnily enough though, when you know, for example, a bassline quite well you can kind of hear it in your head even when it isn’t there. Nevertheless, it isn’t quite the same.

Tonight was good though; we played a few of the oldies, slowing cranking ourselves up in volume with each song, and Ali making idle adjustments to his drumkit and sabotaging himself in the process, via new, wrongly weighted drumsticks (sheesh, what a muso) and his adjusted bass pedal. Of all the oldies I was best pleased with Get Away, which we tried to imbue with a little of yesterday’s carefulness, and managed to find new spaces in the noise. Turning to new songs, we had a great time with Sleepwalk, which is shaping up as a great little song, churning away grungily for the first half before Pete’s guitar goes off like a sparkler at the close, leading us to a chiming countrified end. It sounds really nice.

I’d put together a couple of demos in the week and we spent a bit of time working on one of my new songs, which I think we called Islands though that might change. Victoria has accused me of ripping off XTC on this one, and she’s right. It was one of those songs which we played together quickly and satisfyingly, though it needs work. Another simple and maybe promising one. We ended, as is our wont, with an abrupt version of I want a cigarette, within which I screamed myself hoarse. It hurt.