Savage Pink

Birthday Weekend (Part One)

This past weekend was my Birthday Weekend. Of course you are less happy to shout about the birthdays, the more you have had. However, not being one to miss an opportunity to be the centre of attention, I had a wonderful weekend of pampering and fun. Birthdays, you see, are the single most important holiday of the year. Purely for selfish reasons of course. Of all the holidays, you share the day with the least people possible. You might even be lucky enough to know NO ONE who shares the date with you. How good is that?

So, D and I wandered around London all weekend : something that is so rare these days as we are both working all the time. On Saturday we went to Borough Market by London bridge. If you love food, you would love this market. Small producers, specialist foods from all over the UK and France, Italy, Germany etc. They have alot of amazing cheeses, meats, vegetables, wines, you name it! Some of the stalls sell cooked food, ready to eat stuff as well. We bought alot of nice cheeses, some wild beef, and some rare spices, including some Hawaiian salt which D has always been keen to try. Me, I'm suspicious of pink salt.

Lunch at Fish!, a restaurant right there in the market that specialises in, yes, you guessed it, fish dishes. Unfortunately we were a bit disappointed, we'd been there before but this time it wasn't as good. It was 4.30pm and the haughty hostess greeted us with "have you got a reservation?" and when we said "no", she remarked, with a practiced sneer at her clipboard "not at all?". Jesus christ. It's a fish restaurant in a food market which seats 150 people and you currently have 15 chairs occupied. This number only decreased during our 90 minutes or so in the damn place. I had to send my calamari starter back because it was so rubbery. My main dish of grilled monkfish with garlic & herb butter was excellent though. I love monkfish. Plus we had two bottles of Prosecco to wash it down! And the good thing about Fish! is that it's like a greenhouse : all glass walls. So when the sun made a sudden appearance at 5pm it was really a lovely place to be sitting.

Then we went for a wander along the Thames and over the Millennium Footbridge near St Paul's cathedral. I've never walked across this before, it was built to commemorate the millennium (in case that wasn't clear) and it stretches across the Thames from the Tate Museum to St Paul's cathedral on the other side. The bridge was really controversial when it first opened because of the "wobbly" effect when too many people walked across it. One of the many famous British Millennium Disasters.

Went into the Blackfriar pub for a pint - it's a beautiful old triangular Arts & Crafts pub which didn't use to be opened on weekends. It's so gorgeous inside. Then we walked up to the Spitalfields/Farringdon area and happened on a neat little restaurant called Flaneur which was actually a restaurant in the back of a food hall, so you eat at tables surrounded by 20 foot high shelves stacked with exotic boxes and jars and bottles of food from around the world. My idea of heaven, or what? (Flaneur apparently means "idle man about town". I wonder if there is a feminine equivalent?) It was really low lighting and beautiful big wooden chairs which made you feel very small (an excellent tactic for peddling enormous quantities of food). We had a three course meal which was great, plus a bottle of cava because of course D was totally spoiling me. I had some great asparagus with Roquefort butter, and a steak. D had a really mushroom rissotto for his main course. I have never found rissotto to be acceptable as a main course. It's just a bowl of rice!! C'mon... Dessert was a wickedly good chocolate cake. When they brought the cake to the table, they also brought an enormous soup terrine of freezing cold double cream. Decandence personified. Yum!

Sunday went to the cinema in Hampstead, to the Everyman 'cinema club' which is a new trend here in London at least. Cinemas with big sofa or armchair seating that you reserve in advance, and they serve cocktails and wine and coffees and things. Really comfortable and nice! We saw Brick, which was excellent. It's a kind of murder mystery set in a high school in the present day, but the dialogue is all very stylised 30's and 40's slang : like a Mickey Spillane detective flick or something. Afterwards met some friends at the Gaucho Grill which is an Argentinian place, on Sundays they have an all-you-can-eat BBQ out back. Of course, nothing is straight forward when I'm involved (I have a restaurant curse) but the manager was very accomodating and at the end of the day we stuffed ourselves on meat, which is what we all wanted. Afterwards, went to a "secret pub" that my friend Rachel showed us, hidden behind a bunch of houses in Hampstead. Oh my god, the houses in Hampstead! In the village part, where we are, there all all twisty little footpaths and gorgeous, incredibly old houses all built higgledy-piggledy on top of each other. I was being a total pest and looking right in everyone's windows at their furniture underwear and stuff. The pub was called the Holly Bush which is again, a very very old building - 17th century to be precise. So gorgeous!

After the Holly Bush we all went down into Camden to meet up with some friends of Julie's who were in town for the day.Honestly, it was just so nice to get out and about for the weekend. Usually I'm either working these days or trying to catch up with laundry and cleaning and other delightful domestic chores at the weekend. Having two days to just enjoy being in the city was a total treat.

Part Two coming up next weekend! See, Julie's birthday is on the 18th so we are having some mutual celebrations and that means I get to stretch things out for another whole weekend! Hee hee hee.

Just finished Mo Hayder's fourth novel....

Pig Island by Mo Hayder

They say everyone has one good novel in them. Well perhaps Mo Hayder had two. Birdman, and in particular, The Treatment, were both excellent edge-of-the-seat noirish crime thrillers which brought a welcome new voice to the crowded, but rarely exceptional genre. With Toyko, it seemed Ms Hayder was intent on avoiding the pitfalls of many other authors : churning out endless novels based on overfamiliar detectives which are the equivalent of police soap operas : comfy but unchallenging. Tokyo was a departure, but kept one foot far enough in the thriller camp to satisfy the thrill-hungry among us, while offering a deeper literary experience at the same time.

I had high hopes for Pig Island and was delighted to see her publishers finally getting behind Mo with some advertising muscle. I was titillated by the 'Wicker Man-esque' possibilities of the plot. Unfortunately, this book is an utter disappointment. The characters are generic and unengaging, the plot plods and none of the scarce, but potentially dramatic revelations are used to good effect. Only sheer stubborness drove me to finish the damn thing, and when I did, I was neither surprised by, nor cared about, the supposedly shocking ending. which felt as if it had been written to meet a deadline rather than any kind of literary criteria.

It's a crying shame that this will be the first, and most likely last, Mo Hayder novel that many people will read. I guess my disappoint comes from knowing how far the author has fallen : had Pig Island not had her name on the cover, I never would have guessed that this was the work of a writer I had previously been so delighted by.
I've lent it to Tony who is half way through it and starting to share my disappointment. Pandora, I know you liked the others too so you can have it next if you want!

Keef

Keith Richards is in hospital in New Zealand, recovering from head surgery after he....fell out of a coconut tree? In Fiji?

Yup.

Always a shock, never a surprise

One of the musicians I work with was in town this week, doing press and set up work for a forthcoming album. I get a phone call on Thursday. Turns out said musician has been telling friends of mine about moving on to a new label after this album, and how "bad" he feels about leaving us. Hmmm.

Not really the news I wanted to kick off another day in the office, but there you have it. I'm not ashamed to say that I got quite upset, and yes, shed some tears. I think it was the way I got the news that was particularly galling, and it was pretty humiliating to be told by a friend about an artist on your own label. (Luckily it was my best friend, and he told me because he didn't want me to hear it from anyone else.)
Now, you may be thinking but you've been doing this for 20 years now Allison, why does this sort of behaviour still come as a shock? Surely, things like this happen all the time to independent labels.....

And you'd be quite right. Yes it does happen all the time, and no, I shouldn't be upset. But I am. In this particular case, it's not so much the fact of the matter (artist leaving) as the... well, the dishonesty of the situation that galls me. Said musician is on album three of a three album deal and is absolutely free to walk. And yes, I was aware of the interest from the Other Label. In fact, I was the first one to be approached by the Other Label, in one of those surreal moments that the independent music business is rife with.

Other Label : Hi, I'm from A Label That's Bigger Than Yours.

Me : Nice to meet you.

Other Label : We really love your artist and think he's perfect for our label.

Me : splutter.....

You know... like some girl walking up to you at a bar and saying "Your boyfriend is really great. Can I fuck him?" One can't quite believe one's ears. But, hey, at least the Other Label was honest about it. I have to give them that. They could have done it The Other Way, which would have been approaching the artist in a cloak-and-dagger fashion behind our backs. So fair play. Or rather, unfair play, but in as fair a way as possible. I think.

I even told The Artist about it, immediately. The Other Label approached me and is interested in you. I could tell his head was turned.

So yeah, it wasn't a surprise to hear that he was packing his bags. It was just a massive bummer that he couldn't do me the courtesy of telling me while looking me in the eye. I think it was particularly spineless to tell friends of mine (and taking into account these are not music business friends, these are Real People, and people I introduced The Artist to. Real People who took him into their worlds and made him a friend) and tell them how "bad" he feels about it all. It's just bullshit isn't it? Bullshit and human nature.

Days like this are the days when I really do question whether the hard work and heartache are worth it. I get hurt because I put too much of myself into it. I own things. I care about how to do things, and about getting the right results. So I do take it really personally, when someone lets me down. And no, after all these years I still haven't learned how to keep people at arms length, and protect myself. I wish I could be more pragmatic. Other people at the label tell me to consider that The Artist honoured his agreement with us, gave us the three albums, worked them all to the best of his abilities, co-operated and was grateful for our work along the way. Yes, well... all very true. And indeed this is much more than many artists I have worked with have done. It's just... well, it's such a bummer to be rewarded for doing well by losing out. Finding something no one really cares about, nurturing it and watching it grow, and then, sitting by while the poachers cart it off.

And like I say, I would have just like to have been told to my face. I guess that is just too much to ask.