Will Someone Please Explain Florida to Me?

I’m the problem. It’s me. Florida is fine– they know what they’re doing, lumbering around blinding freeways in their hulking SUVs, eating their fried fish fillets, painting stuff beige, keepin’ it familiar. It’s just that I don’t get it. I try, really I do. I went down there with the best intentions, eager to spend … Continue reading Will Someone Please Explain Florida to Me?

Back to the Beach

I’m about to board a plane for the first time in 14 months and jet down to sunny Florida. Like drug-induced hallucinogenic paranoia, it’s a state I haven’t been in for 25 years, and one I have mixed feelings about revisiting. Working the Caribbean as a lowly musician aboard monstrous American cruise ships, the town … Continue reading Back to the Beach

Pass the Lube; it’s Jazz Time

Apologies for that grinding, squealing noise– it’s just the agonised turning of my rusting gears, protesting after more than a year of neglect. It’s worse than just lack of practice, it’s a soul-deep inertia, my limited life skills desperately longing to remain at rest. But the giant seems to be awakening– I think that explains … Continue reading Pass the Lube; it’s Jazz Time

Let’s Get Ready to Ramble

The word “hike” is one that fills me with immediate and profound dismay. Like when other people hear words like dental surgery or experimental jazz. I immediately conjure up visions of craters and cliffs, ropes and crampons, dehydration and mountain rescue. Normally if I was invited on a hiking trip, I’d fumble desperately for an … Continue reading Let’s Get Ready to Ramble

The Strange New World of Actual Reality

Lately I’ve found myself attempting to withdraw from the digital world. This is part of a bigger effort to excuse myself from the modern world as a whole, and embark on some kind of timeless existence subsisting on wine and raw meat and entertaining myself by reading only the words I can scratch into the … Continue reading The Strange New World of Actual Reality

Snow Business

My blood doesn’t race at the sight of power tools, lumber leaves me cold, and aisles of assorted spanners and sprockets render me confused and enervated. We artistic types stand out in a crowd of burly determined men comparing socket sets and angle grinders, and believe me, singing Olivia Newton-John songs to yourself doesn’t help...

Wouldn’t You Like To Get Away?

I’m not the only one who dreams of escape, am I? After ten months of no gigs, no travel, the same four walls (seventeen actually, my apartment has a lot of weird angles), the endless repetitive news cycle, the North East winter well and truly settled in, surely we’re all mentally tying together our bedsheets and clambering out the window to run off and set up shop somewhere exotic and romantic...

Send In The Tumbleweeds

’ve played the saxophone in some run down places: grim stinking pubs in the forgotten outskirts of Sydney, a few desperate alcoholics braying for ACDC despite our matching suits and 60s Rhythm & Blues setlist; slick cocktail bars in South East Asia, incongruous with the rats and trash, the abject poverty on all sides; below-deck nightclubs on seedy Russian Cruise ships- bleary vodka eyes and sudden outbursts of horrific drunken violence. And then there’s NYC’s West Village, January 2021...

New Year’s Irresolution

So long, suckers, it’s been nice knowing ya. I’m moving up in the world. On my way to where the air is sweet. New year, new Nick. Things are gonna be a whole lot different from here on in. This past week I’ve hauled my accumulated crap up a narrow steep flight of stairs from … Continue reading New Year’s Irresolution

It’s Puddin’ Time

As much as you think you won’t like it, because it’s chock full of gross dried fruit, held together with beef fat, and has been sitting in a corner unrefrigerated for six weeks, Christmas pudding is an objectively wondrous thing, and you will love it. And you will ask for more.

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