Sunday 24 January 2010

Thunder over Kilburn

"But it's raining hard tonight here, up in Kilburn. The drunken men cannot find their way home. They stagger and then fall down in the gutter, singing sad laments of love gone wrong. Thank God! That it will soon be tomorrow. And I'm not lying, soaked out in the street. I'll call you when I wake up, baby. If I can just get off to sleep." Ah yes. Jock Scot's poem Thunder Over Kilburn which might seem to flirt with County Kilburn cliches but is in fact a touching tale of absence making the heart grow fonder. This performance appears on My Personal Culloden where Jock collaborates with the great Davy Henderson's Nectarine No. 9 on what was the reactivated Postcard's swan song. The set features another great London song in White Cars Passing By where Jock refers to going with his girl to the Everyman cinema in Hampstead to see Brigitte Bardot in Godard's Le Mepris and not wanting to leave. Ah nice. The old romantic eh? I remember going there to see Breathless for the first time, falling in love with Jean Seberg and spending weeks rubbing my thumb along my lower lip like Jean Paul Belmondo. And while we're talking about poets and Kilburn ...

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