What happened to France?
It remains hot. Too hot to sleep without the window open, too noisy to sleep without it closed. I arrive at the studio very bewildered.
Dave arrives and we're going to have another go at Outside, applying all that we learned about the drum part last time round. Hopefully that will make it make sense right away. At least there now is some context for the song to live in, it doesn't feel so on its own.
But that doesn't matter, because the real news about today is me and Dan are going to visit Gibson! Dan's got it into his head that I should have an SG, so we made some enquiries and discovered that Gibson would be very happy to lend us a few guitars for a few weeks, so long as I didn't mind them taking a picture of me. It seemed like a small price to pay, so we headed into town to Gibson's London headquarters. They were very friendly, and led us into an atrium where there were lots of pictures of hairy old men playing Les Pauls, and fifty or sixty guitars.
I must confess that up until that moment I had hardly played any Gibsons. My first electric guitar was a Stratocaster because I wanted to be Dave Gilmour.
I played that for almost all of my guitar life up until buying my Rickenbacker just before we made Harrison.
A few years later I got given something called a Fret King for free, and I ended up playing that most during the 45s era because I didn't mind if it got destroyed.
The Rickenbacker really came into its own when we made Still Life, and since then it's been the guitar of Aqualung. It really is much prettier than a strat. So I have rarely been out guitar shopping and consequently know very little.
We spend a happy couple of hours playing various guitars, acoustics and basses and in the end decide to borrow an SG, a (Gold!) Les Paul and a jumbo acoustic which appears to cost a heartbreaking amount. It's very nice though; very strident in the middle. Mmmmmm.
We get back to the studio to find that Dave has executed the drum part successfully. We get out all the guitars and lining them up. "Now it feels like a real studio," says Dan, but we don't actually use them yet because we only have Dave for this afternoon. His violin is being repairedI'm sad to say his mum dropped it.. But he's borrowed a viola, which he says is particularly brown.
It's great that Dave plays the violin. When he was younger he was in denial about being a drummer, insisted on playing the violin instead and liked to be called 'David'. Now we reap the benefits. He plays some lovely brown viola on Human Shield and Rolls So Deep.
Nice work, David.
