A new song I’ve been working on tonight.

Not doing The Camden Market Free Art Man the last four weeks has given me the chance to catch up on work I’ve been putting off. Subsequently, my online shops are now full of new paintings, a couple even managing to sell. Another thing ticked off my to do list is finishing the paintings contesting the nonsense written about my artwork in the book “To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish” by Ted Kessler. Here they are:

Another art project now well underway is the @offgridlife Offgridlife Claymation series of oil transfer drawings. Offgridlife’s fantastic AI claymation videos about FREE ART FREES ART started off this set of, so far, 137 paintings. Most of which are due to be given away at Camden. I expect they’ll be popular and have template drawings done already for the next ones. Here’s the first of the series:

But the main thing I wanted to get done was recording demos for my band Edgeworth Band, although I’m now publishing music by this band under the name The Camden Market Free Art Man as I’ll be giving CD’s away at Camden and want to make it clear that the music’s by me, not just some band I like or am trying to promote. I’m doing Camden tomorrow, so today was the last chance to get started before FREE ART FREES ART starts eating up my time again. It’s been a while since we’ve played any new songs, although I’ve been writing quite consistently. Just not finalising many or recording demos. Tonight, I recorded demos for a song called Plasticine. The video is my favourite of the demos with footage shot during the making, then a reminder to self of how to play it, as I’ll inevitably forget as I start working on other songs, followed by the first demo overlaid with footage I filmed this afternoon of bees pollinating heather. I walked past them on the way to my uncle’s house.

A problem I’ve always had when writing songs is keeping all the parts of each song together in a place I can easily retrieve. Hopefully putting these demo info videos into a YouTube playlist will help solve this. I don’t usually write one song at a time, so revisiting half written songs means trying to remember parts and find old hand-written notes for it. Made even harder by not finishing lyrics and song titles till after the song’s otherwise written, so a lot of the notes for each song don’t have the song title written on. My phone is full of riffs with no useful labelling, so it’s a case of sitting with a guitar and playing each audio file one at a time, looking for bits that relate to the song I’m trying to put together. Such a complicated and arduous process for such simple songs, but 99% of what I write’s useless so it all has to be whittled down. If I can get tomorrow’s Camden video done in time, I’ll try and get another demo done before midnight, when the foxes in our garden start wailing and putting an end to any hopes of recording audio. Emma Pugmire, my drummer’s coming round next Thursday at 5pm to start practicing our next set of songs. Then dinner before we join Ron Throop @ronthroop for another of our weekly Black Ivory Podcast recordings at 7pm UK time. Broadcast live from Ron’s Substack if you fancy tuning in.