Our band has changed its name from “Edgeworth Band” to “The Camden Market Free Art Man”. I haven’t told Emma yet but gave her a copy of our latest album under the new name, so she’ll notice at some point.

I can hardly believe a search through my YouTube videos suggests that last night was the first time we’ve played together since 2024. It can’t have been much longer ago, if at all, that Ron Throop @ronthroop was over here from New York, when Emma, Ron and I, the three members of Black Ivory, made some jazz improvisation albums under the name Farangers. Farangers is a slang term they use in Thailand for westerners. I go to Thailand a lot and hope to retire there.

Last night, we rehearsed a new song called Plasticine and an old one Emma might not have played before called Disgraced Dean. At the time of writing Disgraced Dean has almost double the YouTube views of any other of last night’s songs with nine. Other than those two, we just played some songs we were familiar with to get back in the swing. I say familiar, but Emma still hasn’t memorised any of our songs yet despite being in the band since its inception around 2015. For once we didn’t play any covers. There’s too many new songs to bother with covers for a while. I hate to think how many new songs are sitting on my phone from 2024 onwards. If it’s really two years since we practiced there must be well over a hundred.

All the gigs we’ve played so far have been around London but we haven’t brought enough people to get many repeat bookings. The only venue we’re played more than once is The Islington which has since shut down. Hopefully not because of us. Some great people played there including Thurston Moore whose music I really like. One of the reasons I wanted to play there was because I thought he might be hanging around at the bar, hear us and decide he wants to join our band. I think he lives in London now since his marriage broke up.

Before booking any more gigs I’m going to try and drum up more of an audience at The Camden Market Free Art Man. I don’t think Emma and I busking would work but having artwork themed on our music covered in our band themed Advertism with copies of our new album available to take will hopefully get us off the ground. Camden’s the perfect location for our style of music. Playing our albums at Camden on a ghetto blaster wouldn’t be fair on the punks on the other side of the bridge who also play their music. Not their own songs, but old punk bands. They’ve been there a lot longer than I have and play a lot of music I like. I’m pretty sure Zombie told me Nirvana’s his favourite band. I don’t know if he knows that Emma and I did an album of Nirvana covers.

Band practice is now timetabled into being a weekly event every Thursday at 5pm, immediately followed by recording The Black Ivory Podcast, also weekly, with Ron Throop. Ron couldn’t make this Thursday so I think we’re rescheduling for this weekend sometime. Stay tuned for exacter details. Just Ron and I this time. Tune in on either Ron or my Substacks if you want to see it live. We talk about all things art and music, including the latest progress of Ron’s dedicated and relentless pursuit of averaging three paintings a day for the next twenty years, therefore guaranteeing a legacy of at least 20,000 paintings. I was doing it too for a while but gave up after four days. Averaging one new song a week shouldn’t be a problem though. Plasticine was this week’s:

Full playlist: