Month: August 2009

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  But the circus train is way out on the plain stuck in a one horse town and you don’t have you fair home anymore. What to do? Sweep the Elephants tent out for the last time and hitch hike, but which way is home…

 From a holiday when things were changing quite a bit.

Had a fun gig with Elephant Shelf last night (Thursday) though possibly a little bit on the loud side. My brain was not fully engaged as I forgot my keyboard stand but I managed with a table though it was a little bit awkward. But it went OK so that’s  fine though I did get a blister on my thumb from over-enthusiastic Piano playing. I must admit I am playing through a lot of gigs on remote control at the moment as I am rather preoccupied. The Shelf is getting radio play on about 6 European stations which can’t be bad

On Friday I  spent the whole day doing OOP as much of my php code is not using objects  so a bit of serious revision just to get my mind working again interspursed with quite a bit of piano playing too.  I must admit that I tend to watch TV when I am codeing stuff with one eye, any one else admit to doing that ? I shall start hacking wp about as I have moded alot of  the other CMS systems but wordpress is very easy to use as the back end of  a cms with out too much effort so I will be putting  a shopping cart to this blog to flog some of my stuff in the not to distant future, and a few other fun things.

Diana is a performing composer and muscian playing Piano Violin and Guitars. She currently plays with the Rock/Roots band Elephant Shelf and also the Delta Ladies who mix roots acoustic music and electronica. She composes in a variety of styles from pop to rock to Jazz and and classical music.Diana is also expert in multi-media recording and music production.

Really Really tired, like when everything is just too much effort? Yep me too. Its been a difficult time over the past few months and nothing seems to have worked out on a practical basis. Every idea I have had for scratching out a living has been a complete flop and I don’t know if its simply that I am not good enough at what I do or just a sign of the times. I do feel a little bit a drift now though.

I tried reducing my anti-depressant meds dose to see if I could get a little bit more motivation but that only makes me irritable and makes my concentration worse, and its looking more and more like I  am going to end up filing in and office somewhere or worse to survive and the thought is rather dispiriting after all the effort I have put in to everything else, particularly over the last 2 years or so.

The main thing is I can’t work the way I used to0,  my  mind wanders and after a a couple of hours I have just drifted away.
Deadlines get me stressed and my mind go’s completely blank plus there is the worry about money which is becoming more and more pressing all the time too.

I played at a garden party yesterday in my ‘Delta Ladies’ incarnation. We had a great time and everyone was enjoying it and we sold some albums too, only another 112 and we break even 🙂 The house was in Lonesome lane.  For the first 40 minutes of the set my mind was just completly absent, I played OK but basically on auto-pilot, by the end I was feeling more normal thank goodness though. The thing is in previous work that I have done apart from powerpoint presentations you could not do it terribly well in an altered state of consciousness, though that did happen a few times I have to admit.

Here are some pictures taken by my good friend Ralph Stephenson.

This is one of my all time favorite pictures so far proving that you can have fun with Elephant Shelf

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We played our first ‘Hot August Fringe’ date last night, it went OK though we did not get quite the reaction we can sometimes get. There was quite an over run from the first act so we had to get on stage PDQ and that slightly killed the vibe. Not sure if the audience were expecting something more comedic as we are primarily a music act still we had a few folks in the house and its a very different kind of venue for us and so a bit of an experiment. We could not engage with the audience in the usual way. Perhaps they were too sober?

Maybe its because I’m a Londoner that I’m a psychotic paranoid lunatic
Maybe its because I’m a Londoner that I’m not safe after dark
I get a funny feeling inside of me, then I go on the prowl
Maybe its because I’m a Lunatic that I love London so….

London a perfect place for me…

I find the idea of pressing a proper CD quite appealing, and although it would cost a few bob it would be quite satisfing to do.
The track listing is pretty much sorted out so the question then is how many to press 500 or a 1000? I feel that it would be good to have something tangible rather than just the downloads. It would at least be some sort of a statement.