Amsterdam > London
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
12
25
Trip End
Sep 05, 2007
London,
United Kingdom
Saturday, July 14, 2007
(London, Friday, July 13, 2007)-Following up on my GUITAR ARMY book tour in the States, Adam Parfrey and Jodi Wille of Feral House hooked me up with Turnaround Distributors, their representatives for the UK and northern Europe. Bill Godber of Turnaround in turn hooked me up with the people at the Latitude Festival, an eclectic outdoor celebration staged in a rural setting in Suffolk about 100 miles from London.
The Latitude Festival was happy to add my reading from GUITAR ARMY to their voluminous bill in the Literary Tent for Sunday afternoon, and Bill extended an invitation to put me up at his place in the North End of London so I could play the festival and maybe do a couple of interviews while I was in town. Turnaround would also cover my airfare and ground transportation from Stansted Airport. That sounded good to me and I quickly signed on for a fast trip to the United Kingdom.
At the same time I had been corresponding with my friend Joe Cushley in London, who was working as the music director for a series of television programs on American blues and jazz artists being produced in London for the Smithsonian Institution in the U.S.A. Joe had asked me to act as an informant for the series, providing improvised commentary to complement the musical performances by Etta james, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Buddy Guy and other featured artists. His crew was leaving for America on July 16th and we were trying to figure out a way I could cut the segments for his series before they departed. If I could be in London to shoot my parts on the afternoon of Friday the 13th, everything would work out fine.
With a little extra assistance from Bill Godber I was able to rearrange my flight from Amsterdam to arrive at Stansted on Friday morning. A bus from the airport and the tube to King's Cross brought me to the King Charles I Pub in plenty of time to make the Smithsonian shoot for 2:00 pm with Joe Cushley and his top-flight film crew. Everything proceeded smoothly and with great precision as we viewed the performances and I added my commentaries, and by 6:00 o'clock the shoot was wrapped up and we were out the door. I took the Piccadilly Line to Turnpike Lane and walked around a couple of corners to Bill's place to meet my host just as he was getting home from work.
Bill and I sat up for a while over a couple of smokes and talked about books and everything else under the sun. I finally turned in for a splendid night's sleep and woke up to a sunny Saturday morning and an entire day off in London to be spent exploring the neighborhood in the afternoon, sharing a delightful meal with Bill Godber and his friend Jane Goodsir in the evening and venturing downtown on the tube at night. I had just missed my friends in the Warren Haynes band when they'd played Amsterdam earlier in the week, and they were urging me to join them Saturday night at the concert hall they were playing in London, but as it turned out I couldn't find the goddamned place, gave up and caught the tube back to Bill's place to call it a night. In the morning we would pile into Bill's car and make the drive down to Suffolk for the Latitude Festival.
-Detroit
August 26, 2007
