higherpowermoment.com

Yes, it’s more Wayne’s World quotes.

As our regular reader(s) will be aware, higherpowermoment.com is of course on the interweb’s top trend spotting cutting edge music blogs, responsible for making or breaking bands, setting the agenda, and defining the zeitgeist.

Longtime higherpowermoment.com faves are Spanish electro pop with indie guitar sensibilities band Delorean. See here and here. Now some obscure American outfit called Pitchfork has belatedly hitched on our bandwagon, seen which way the wind has been blowing, and given their latest E.P., brilliantly entitled “Ayrton Senna”, 8.4.

All I can say is welcome to the party, Pitchfork, higherpowermoment.com was here yonks before you, and we give this 11.0.

Please note the original Spanish 12″ artwork, not the pants they are flogging in the States. Wooo! We are so special and different! We were there first! I have this record. But no record player.

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Delorean - Seasun

Now this seems like a rather peculiar suggestion for staying off the drink. Who are these loons? OK, so having a nibble of chocolate or ice-cream if you feel like drinking may well quell the impulse, on the basis that sweet things don’t tend to go well with alcohol, or that it’s a displacement activity, but come on… Like that’s gonna work? Surely I need electro-shock therapy or something, not Smarties?

But I’ve got to remember that this book is a distillation of the experiences of many recovering alcoholics, and if they suggest it, well it might be worth a try.

I remember being amazed in rehab when they said I might like to eat 3 meals a day (what, not just an avocado to go with my 12 cans and 40 Silk Cut?), gentle exercise, relaxation techniques, no caffeine in the evening, early to bed, early to rise. For years I thought that sort of stuff was for civilians - it didn’t apply to me surely? Yet when these suggestions were made by highly qualified professionals, for some reason I seemed to accept it more readily than if they had been made by, well, somebody like my mum, on the basis that they were simple common sense. I guess I was on my knees, and willing to do anything, and at that point I’d decided that the rehab staff were gods. Who knows whether the breathing exercises or the redbush tea or a Mars bar got me through that time. But I don’t regret trying them. My rock bottom had taken me to a point where I was sufficiently open minded to try what was suggested. Later I had to follow that through with the completely unqualified non-professionals in my 12 step fellowships. But, if I was willing to try lying on the floor of a mental hospital with my head on a pillow clenching and unclenching my leg muscles to a soundtrack of the pan-pipes of the Andes, all because a doctor said so, then being willing to try having an ice-cream when I feel like a craving for vodka because a room full of sober people suggested it was perhaps not too much to ask.

Unfortunately ice-cream is out the window for me right now, but if I was allowed it, I love Risis Ices’ cherry flavour (hmmm, maybe there’s a sponsorship opportunity here…). So, in honour of that, here’s New York’s Ratatat with “Cherry” from their self-titled 2004 album, a very sweet, chilled and sexy electronic ditty. Impress your friends and acquaintances by stroking your beard and saying “hmmm, the build up, the lull, and don’t you just love the way it climaxes at point of the Golden Ratio?”.

As a bonus I’ve included the video as the visuals seem to work particularly well with the song.

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Ratatat - Cherry

Next topic: Making use of ‘telephone therapy’.

In recovery we are often told to listen out for the similarities and not the differences. This can be hard - it’s pretty natural to seek to compare and contrast your history with other people’s stories. There’s a killer word that gets fired back at you when you start sentences with the words “I never…” or “I didn’t…”: the word is YET. I sat in my early meetings thinking “well, I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never been to a mental hospital, I’ve never seen the inside of a cell…” and distinguished myself from the other people in the room. Maybe they were more hardcore than me? Maybe I wasn’t a proper addict? Maybe I didn’t have to do all the stuff they did? Some of them spoke of relapses - well, I’d abstained since I’d got into the rooms, so that wasn’t going to happen to me either, right? Well, not yet. The occurrence of some of those “yets” (well, all of them actually) in the course of a full blown relapse helps me understand a little more clearly why members of my fellowship say “But for the Grace of God” when they see people in worse positions than themselves. It’s all out there waiting for us. I may be clean, one day at a time, but in the meantime my disease is doing press-ups in the hope that I get complacent.

I’ve mentioned to one or two friends that I’ve been doing this blog. I’m not sure whether publishing it is an entirely sensible idea, but so far the reaction has been supportive (or at least there’s an absence of negative), and it does force me to write something positive about the programme on a daily basis, so for the time being I’m sticking with it. One of those friends emailed me the following song by Nick Lowe. I’ve been conscious of it before, I’d heard the Johnny Cash cover and been vaguely aware of the original on an episode of the Sopranos. And I listened to it once in a rush and thought, yes, nice song, but a bit obvious maybe… Something a bit more obscure, perhaps…? Some more jangly indie-pop, maybe?

Well, I’ve just listened to it a couple more times tonight, and of course The Song Is Going In The Blog, and what is more, I’m sticking the lyrics up too. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Nick Lowe and The Beast In Me (from 1994’s The Impossible Bird).

Nick Lowe - Photo: Dan Burn-Forti

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bonds
Restless by day
And by night, rants and rages at the stars
God help, the beast in me
The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes
It tries to kid me that it’s just a teddy bear
Or even somehow managed
To vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me
That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s New York or New Year
God help the beast in me
The beast in me

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Nick Lowe - The Beast In Me

Next topic: This Too Shall Pass