Dear friends out there in the wide world,

As I finally get a moment of neither driving nor singing, I find myself back in an industrial unit in Well Rough waiting for a new calliper and a length of cable to get Bella, The Great White Hope through this years’ MOT. It’s been a slightly gruelling, but thoroughly enjoyable couple of weeks, playing pretty much every day all around the West Country with an emergency mission to cover for The Hot Rats at Broadstairs in East Kent thrown in to test my driving stamina.

The music has been flowing beautifully and we’ve had some incredible shows, but the shoulder injury I’ve been nursing for the last couple of months has become excruciating, and doesn’t seem to appreciate a constant regime of either roundabouts or guitar playing. To be honest, playing the guitar is fairly comfortable; humping cases around and steering, less so.

We only have a few shows left before I need to skedaddle home to the mountains and get back to building, and I’d love to catch up with as many of you as possible before the off.

This Thursday, August 24th, we are playing our only Northamptonshire show of the year; Little Ember Sessions at The Talbot Hotel in Oundle. I know it’s a school night and all that, but it’s our only chance to play a local show for local people, so if you’re anywhere nearby, or know anyone who is, please help us to spread the word and fill the place up.

It’s a beautiful venue in the heart of historic Oundle run by good people, so help us make their day. Tickets are available here. If you’re in touch with any PWS old-timers, The Sofa Sessions crew or any other musical connections, let them know.

The same goes for our only remaining London show, this Sunday, August 27th at the incredible new Jamboree, tucked away on a charming corner right next to King’s Cross Station. It’s a perfect concert venue with fine beers, wines and the like. If you’re anywhere near London, or indeed a train station, come and join us, or send your friends along. Tickets are available here…

As the rest of the world seems to be on fire, devastating vast swathes of humanity as governments squabble about who best to sell more weapons and oil to, England had somehow managed to almost totally avoid summer this year. We’ve had the odd glimmer of sunshine, but generally a wind-tan has been about as much as I can manage.

To all of the dear people we’ve met over the past few weeks, and are therefore new to this blog, I normally have more time for musings on the wider world in a slightly more poetic and amusing manner, but right now fixing the van and trying to sell enough tickets to eat are priorities, so I’ll have to keep it short.

Some recent highlights have been; reuniting with Mati Congas and the Clovelly contingent at the aptly named Glorious Oyster in Instow, replete with incredible oysters and the best dune-based music scene I’ve found in years, catching up with Tirion, Dave and the whole crew at the Psychedelic Dentist Sessions, discovering The Morgawr, Falmouth’s brand-spanking new venue for classy music and sea-monsters, another unforgettable night at Hatch Court, our first ever show at the sublime Ashburton Arts Centre, singing a wide variety of revolutionary musics in what used to be Glastonbury’s Conservative Club (where I’m sure Rees-Mogg, Thatcher and other “honorables” have trod the boards over the years) as the sun set gently on the honey-coloured high-street behind us (thanks to Dan Caruso for setting it up), and finishing our last Broadstairs show with James Kelly, Danny Tonks and other Kentish luminaries sitting, wrapt, on the floor at our feet, lapping up the last of the poetry.

In Bristol, I was honoured to be made custodian of the late, great Nick Clyne’s beautiful guitar by his daughter and my dear friend, Jess. Nick, to those who didn’t know him, was the head sound engineer for Small World Solar Stage at Glastonbury and a host of other festivals, and an all round good egg, bad boy and author of such classics as Old Enough to Know Better and Plinky-Plonky, Sucking Off a Donkey as well as The Deadbeat Diaries.

A prime example of Simian Ashkanasi (as he would put it) he headed a team of miscreants known as The Gingineers who have amplified and tormented generations of musicians in equal measure. Nick died after a long struggle with cancer ten years ago, and after a particularly good rendition of Pass it Along last year, Jess decided that it was time his guitar was played again, and this year we finally managed to cross paths and make it happen. She had assured Spike that I wouldn’t play it, as I only like my guitar, but I sang one song on it that very night and ended up singing five in a row.

Thank you so much my dear. It is a beautiful instrument, it’ll save me a fortune in strings now I have one in one tuning and another in another, and it’s a true joy to be able to tell tales of your dad and his antics to various crowds around the world. I shall dig out my copy of Kind of Orange and learn all his songs when I get a moment.

Talking of the dearly departed, it’s with great sadness I learned that Derek Pace; father of my belle-soeur, Joanna, grandfather to my niece and nephew, mechanical genius, bagman of the Rutland Morris and all round incredible man, dropped dead on his way to the garden at his care home last Saturday morning. He will be dearly missed by all who knew him. So much love to the whole family.

For any of you who knew the great Nick Noodles, particularly those who were unable to make it to his funeral, if there’s any chance you can make it out to Oundle on Thursday, I’d really love to catch up. I could only go to the funeral for an hour between epic drives, and we’ve got a good couple of stonking songs to sing for him.

It’s been quite the summer for tragedy, both personal and across much of the world. My heart goes out to all those struggling against the odds in La Haina, Yellowknife, the Okanagan, Taiwan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Ukraine, Nagorno Kharabakh, Afghanistan; the list goes on. I can’t offer many solutions other than singing to people, fiddling while Rome burns, so to speak, but I do think that if we could all try to spend a bit more time singing and a bit less fighting, it couldn’t hurt.

With so much love from a somewhat physically broken, but spiritually enriched journeyman, now fully furnished with a new MOT,

Jez

Dear Friends around the world,

I find myself looking out at dappled sunshine on rampant undergrowth for the first time in what seems like forever.

As the south of Europe burns in the fierce heat and prevailing winds, one reason so many Brits continue to fly to Greek islands which are literally on fire, is that it’s been almost continuously bleak, damp and windy in England since we made our way down from sunny Scotland at the end of June, and perhaps the chance of drying out seems worth the risk to a mildewed populace.

Massive respect to all the crews who’ve managed to run tent-based festivals despite it all. Tolpuddle sadly had to be cancelled at the last minute, for the first time ever, as gale-force winds threatened to whisk the tent away to Bere Regis and beyond, but Pig’s Ear Folk Ale, perched on the High Weald of Kent somehow managed to cling on for dear life with only minor wind-based mishaps, and when we arrived to join the great Tim Edey & friends on the Sunday, the clouds miraculously parted and we were treated to a bucolic sunset and musical magic from all directions. Thanks to Euan, James, Jen, Puffin and the whole crew for making it happen.

We are about to embark on our next run of shows, from Margate to Cornwall and back. If you or any of your associates are within striking distance of any of these places, we thoroughly look forward to singing to you along the way.

All tickets are available through the “Shows” page of the website, apart from those gigs where you don’t need a ticket. There are still a few left for tonight’s show at Rosslyn Court in Cliftonville, Margate, (Thursday July 27th) and we could really do with filling the place, so if you’re anywhere near east Kent, just click here for tickets, or if you'd like to watch online from the comfort of your own device, here's the link...

If you’re bed-ridden, housebound or just unable to make it along, our gig at The Bell in Bath from a couple of Mondays ago is available in its entirety to watch on youtube. I made a couple of howling lyrical errors but otherwise everyone tells me we were on fine form, and it’s well worth a watch, if you fancy a bit of music. Beautifully captured by the great Steve Holder on sound and vision, here you go…

The past couple of weeks have been tinged with tradgedy. The week before my dear friend Mark “Grizz” Adams’ funeral last Wednesday, which, despite the sadness, was an incredible reunion and a joyous celebration of a brilliant man, drawing people back to King’s Cliffe from as far afield as Australia, we learned of the tragic passing of yet another dear friend, leaving an aching chasm in the hearts of many.

Nick Noodles; soundman extraordinaire, DJ, guitar picker, car-fixer, shoulder-lender, purveyor of bass (and the rest) for the legendary Krunch sound system, chief-archivist of Northants music for 3 decades and finest wrapper of cables in the business, took his own life on the night of July 4th. He’d been left in a desperate situation and decided it was time to move on. It is a savagely difficult reality for many of us to even begin to understand and come to terms with.

My heart goes out to Nikita, Brenda, Joe, Chris and the many friends he leaves behind. Deepest thanks to Kim for working tirelessly to organise his affairs, many tons of equipment and meticulously organised and individually labelled belongings, as well as the funeral, which takes place at Peterborough Crematorium this Friday, July 28th at 3pm.

 

Anyone who’d like to join us to celebrate Nick’s life, is welcome either at the ceremony or afterwards at The Ship Inn, Oundle. Bright colours, or indeed anything you fancy wearing, will be the order of the day.

Whether you knew Noodles or not, there’s a brief tribute and a rousing song in his memory on the video above. If a whole concert is a bit daunting to plough through, I completely understand, you can find it at 1:52:50 (as in 1 hour, 52 minutes and 50 seconds) into the proceedings. In the coming days I will find some tech-savvy friend who can cut it out for me so I can share it more widely, but that’s beyond me, so I’ll have to wait.

And for now, I must fly. So many miles to drive and much to do before the off. For those of you in the south, east and west of England, I look forward to catching up with as many of you as possible over the coming weeks.

Please help us to share the flyer, tell your friends, contact your favourite radio show and ask them to play our music, recommend this blog, buy albums and spread the word.

Making a living is difficult, but being able to continue singing to you all is so rewarding. Sorry I’ve no time to rant on about our tragicomic political scene. For once I’ll spare you…

With much love from the back of the van, as the rain steadily patters once more on the solar panels,

Jez
 

Dear listeners and readers of the world,

Deepest thanks to all the wonderful folks who have made our wee jaunt to the Scottish borders such an absolute delight. It was a true joy to catch up with so many dear friends for the first time in years, along with so many new faces and characters; it’s more than enough to remind us why we do it.

Right now I’m perched in the back of the van in a not too noisy industrial estate, waiting for my exhaust to be repaired, after it finally gave way en-route from Lancaster, and trying to catch up on as much correspondence, promotion and admin as I can before we need to hit the road again. It’s the best thing about enforced pit-stops, they give me a couple of hours without distraction to try to catch up.

Tonight we’re heading to Oxford to party with the ‘Gyptians, before our next run of shows down south. If you or any of your associates are anywhere near any of these places, come and join us, or send your friends along. The music has been flowing with righteous inspiration, and our audiences have been going home with a spring in their
step, so if you fancy some musical balm, take your chance while we’re still in the country.

Friday June 30th - Oxford - “Gyptians
Saturday July 1st - Hampshire - Hartstock, Holybourne
Sunday July 2nd - London - Jamboree Venue, King’s Cross
Wednesday July 5th - Leytonstone - What’s Cookin’
Thursday July 6th - Portslade - Railway Roots
Saturday July 8th - Tolpuddle Village Hall
Monday July 10th - Bath - The Bell Inn

Having managed to make a small profit after all the diesel costs, I’m now spending that on the exhaust, as is so often the way, so the more people we can lure to concerts, the better chance we have of eating.

As we’ve raced around the countryside, singing our hearts out, we’ve been accompanied by the usual annals of doom and despair leaking out of the radio and displayed in semi-literate barks from the front-pages in petrol-station forecourts. It’s always a curious phenomenon, to drive, juddering along the potholed remnants of roads, fuelled by service-station “meal” deals, and a steady torrent of monetised despair, to arrive in various oases of culture and wax lyrical about compassion, gardening, community and poetry.

It’s deeply nourishing to get the opportunity to actually communicate with people, and try to remind them that there is hope and inspiration all around us, but easy to see why so many perfectly intelligent people, on observing the madness of our contemporary scene and wondering whether they’re the only sane one, end up, through that old gem, peer-pressure, concluding rather that they must be mad, and seeking solace in medication, isolation or a constant stream of renovation and/or auctioneering shows on the telly.

Where the French tend to express their malaise in terms of burning down the Town Hall (as you can see live on TV right now, if the mood takes you) when the authorities push them too far, it seems the British, despite our much-vaunted stoicism, are more inclined in recent years to retreat into solitary despair, and shrug off the outrageous levels of corruption, inequity, and incompetence with a quiet “Oh dear”, as illustrated so well in Adam Curtis’ film Hypernormalisation.

We at The Djukella Orchestra are blessed to be given regular opportunity (now it’s legal again) to gather people together and get them laughing, thinking and singing together, and I am forever grateful.

Time and time again, I see folks at the moment they realise they are not insane, but had just been surrounded by far too many of the wrong stimuli to engender decent mental health. All it takes sometimes is to just get together with your neighbours and sing a very long tomato, for example.

On that note, I would like to offer huge thanks to all of you who keep the faith, and remember that by smiling at strangers, offering a helping hand and checking in on our neighbours we can all give each other a leg-up and remind the demoralised that we’re all brilliant, we may have merely forgotten.

In particular, from this recent trip, my old mucka, Reverend Andrew Smith, Diana de Gruyther, Kate, Alex and the ever-beguiling Hester, Charlie Tibbles (without whom Falkirk may well slip from its axis and go spiralling into the heart of the sun), prize-fighter Margaret Cooper and her big brother Dick Gaughan, who’s reportedly dispirited, but should well remember that the fire of his songs keep many of us out on the road, and will do in perpetuity, the mighty Michael Mackenzie, Keiron & Chris at Arcadia Music Cafe, the amazing Black & Blue (Tom & Craig Anderson), Mama Mule and her incredible team, Georgina, Ren and the Old School Brewery crew, Daihi, Catherine, Keir and Ali, and last but not least, Nye Parsons for his mellifluous majesty and Yasmine for putting up with us.
 

Now it is time for me to pack up and prepare for the next journey, but I’d just like to offer salutations to my dear friends Mark “Griz” Adams of King’s Cliffe, who passed away last week, Daniel “Huck” Rivers of Chicago, Jong He and everywhere in between, who was taken a few weeks before that, Yann Kircher Maltais of Engomer and Bill Morris of Celtic Music Radio in Glasgow who both passed with too little fanfare back in the winter. You were all absolute legends. My heart goes out to all who knew you. 

To those of you who’re still with us, let’s get together and sing as soon as logistically possible. I look forward to it immensely.

With much love from Well Rough,

Jez
 

Dear friends near and far,

For those of you who’ve been reading my rants for years, my apologies for the long radio-silence. For those of you who we’ve only just met in the last couple of weeks, welcome; what a lot of fun it’s been.

As the thick, sultry air finally cracks, and yields a few drops on the parched ground, I have a rare, brief moment of not driving, and thought I’d try to write a very short missive before we have to hit the road again this afternoon, bound for Markfield Rectory in Leicestershire, on our way north for our first foray in to bonny Scotland since before the world stopped.

After so many months of masonry, carpentry and the like, it has been a true delight to be back on the road, singing to some of the most charming audiences I’ve seen in years.

To add to the joy, the cricket is on the radio, interspersed with the regular and explosive tantrums of the discredited viagra-addled honey-monster who used to be Prime Minister, as he throws all the toys out of the pram in defence of his integrity, between howls of indignation and snarls of retribution.

The whole circus has been as ridiculous as the very notion of “Sir” Mogg, or indeed the antics of the orange-coloured sex-pest across the water, and some day soon I may find long enough to muse a little on the dastardly doings of charlatans, but for now, back to manouevres…

Saturday June 17th, we’re playing at The Rectory in Markfield, LE67 9WE
Sunday June 18th - Gatley, Greater Manchester
Tuesday June 20th - The Walled Garden, Arkleton DG13 0HL
Wednesday June 21st - Falkirk Folk Club, FK1 1RG
Thursday June 22nd - Biggar - Arcadia Music Cafe, ML12 6DP
Friday June 23rd - OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS anywhere from the borders to Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Durham or Westmorland!
Saturday June 24th- Ditto

So if you are anywhere nearby, or know folk who are, please help us fill them up. Trying to make a living is even harder than it used to be, but the music is flowing like never before, so catch us while you can.

Deepest thanks to all at Small World Festival for such a warm welcome home, to Maria and the whole team at The Horton, Epsom’s brand-new arts centre (situated in the frankly sublime chapel and only remaining remnant of europe’s largest psychiatric hospital - it really has to be seen/heard to be believed) for the incredible work you’re doing down in Surrey, to Dan Lambert, Tomos Lewis and the whole Cardiff crew for a marvellous night, and to Joy and all at Gower Folk Festival for the most incredible event.

Situated right next to Weobley Castle, with a stunning view of the entire Loughour Estuary, it’s the most beautifully situated, programmed and curated festival I’ve encountered for years. Every single act, kept drawing me back each time I tried to run an errand; such variety and consistent quality, and the audience were a treat. In festival crowds, I can often spot the listening eyes peaking out like prairie-dogs above the mélée, but this lot were pure prairie-dog, front to back. Thank you all so much for listening so intently.

Sadly I'm running out of time so you'll have to look the incredible acts up yourself on the festival website (do!), but the cherry on top was that I had no idea that my great heroes Nancy Kerr and James Fagan were half of the Melrose Quartet who followed us, bringing a resounding harmonious close to the evening. After the occasional email exchange over the years, we finally met for the first time at sound-check, and I was blessed enough to be able to recite to Nancy some of her own poetry, which she had forgotten. They wrapped up the whole deal with a glorious rendition of Bright Morning Stars Are Rising, and I all but melted.

The lovely people in the session put even a dusting of sugar on the cherry and for a time, at least in my mind, all was well with the world.

Now, I must get back to the road. Thanks to all we’ve come across so far. Looking forward to catching up with plenty more of you along the way.

Stay brilliant,

Jez

Dear friends around the world,

After a long, hard winter shivering in various parts of a building-site, wrestling with French bureaucracy and enduring rather too much existential despair, spring has finally burst onto the scene around these parts. The radio tells me that the cities of France are on fire and the whole country has ground to a halt in absolute revulsion at Macron’s extra-parliamentary shenanigans, but you wouldn’t know it from here.

About ten days ago, as though someone had flicked a switch, temperatures suddenly rose ten degrees and everything started to grow. We've even had a touch of rain for the first time in months, which is helping no end after a remarkably dry winter; wildflowers carpet the floor in the woods, the ash trees are starting to push out their first tentative leaves of the season and the hum of insects is back on the breeze.

I’ve been getting myself back into the habit of playing music everyday, rather than spending all my time putting calluses on the wrong parts of my hands, and it’s been going quite well, which is always reassuring. Gigs are starting to line up for the summer, and with any luck I’ll at least be able to afford the diesel to get to them.

For anyone of a Welsh persuasion or with a penchant for Dylan Thomas, we’ll be playing Gower Folk Festival on Saturday, June 10th, for those in Surrey or thereabouts, we’re at The Horton, a beautiful new venue in Epsom, on Thursday June 15th, and for my fellow country-folk of Northamptonshire we’ve got a candlelit show for Little Ember Sessions at The Talbot Hotel in Oundle on Thursday, August 24th. There will plenty more, but for now, tickets for these shows are available, and we’d love to sell them out.

As seems be the case with many people at the moment, I’ve been really struggling with depression and overwhelming bouts of anxiety for months, not helped by an onslaught of demands for ridiculous sums of money from a plethora of intimidating acronyms, but I’m beginning to get on top of that, at least. The more disturbing French ones turned out to be an error on their part, but their automatic system continued to send me increasingly frightening demands week after week, despite endless chats with their very helpful and understanding call-centre staff. At the moment, I haven’t had one for over a month, and (touch wood) I have a feeling the message may finally have got through.

As for His Majesty’s lot, the very cheek of them informing me that I owe them for “overpayments made during the COVID measures” is a little harder to swallow. I received two payments totalling about £400 to see me through a year of lost work, when peers, cronies and assorted criminals, friends of Matt Hancock and other unsavoury characters gorged on multiple billions from the government teat, of which a mere 0.9% has been recovered or even pursued.

It may be my cut-throat business brain speaking, but it seems a slightly flawed strategy to relentlessly pursue the poor, desperate and disabled for money that they don’t have, when such fortunes have been squirrelled away all around; often by people not much brighter than the aforementioned washed-up politician, who willingly gave hundreds of thousands of incriminating WhatsApp messages to a “journalist” renowned for betraying her sources and landing them in jail. He even paid her for the privilege.

Such madness seems all the rage at the moment. At the start of last week, the 20th anniversary of the invasion and consequent destruction of Iraq was marked with great fanfare on the morning news; accompanied without a trace of irony in the triumvirate of headlines by a press-release from the UN warning that the world is at a tipping point in terms of environmental catastrophe, and to end on a positive note, a piece celebrating the order of one million incendiary shells to be shipped to Ukraine.

The cognitive dissonance required to swallow, or indeed spew, such paradoxical nuggets of information in the same breath is surely worth some sort of prize. I’m left wondering just how many times I need to drive my gas-guzzling SUV to the supermarket and back to leave the carbon-footprint of just one of these incendiary shells, which I’ve since heard are laced (or perhaps blessed) with small amounts of depleted uranium; to help the medicine go down, I suppose.

In the twenty years since the start of Bush and Blair’s (or perhaps Rove and Campbell’s - how names blur in the haze of time) ill-fated crusade for “freeman-moxy” in the Middle East, countless tons of ordinance have been rained down liberally on an ever increasing itinerary of countries, while we’re all encouraged to scrupulously separate our recyclable waste and compost teabags. Again, maybe our sights are trained in the wrong direction.

It does seem to be the season of portentous anniversaries. The 30th anniversary of the privatisation of Britain’s water infrastructure is marked by the release of literally millions of gallons of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and beaches, as the hedge funds who run the system cream off yet more dividends; liberated, as they are from decades of EU regulation, monitoring and investment which had eventually managed to undo some of the damage done by two centuries of industrial effluent.

The 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement, which brought an effective end to decades of sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland, having recently been put to the test by Johnson’s “oven-ready Brexit deal”, was celebrated with a warning of “imminent’ terrorist attacks to accompany Joe Biden’s upcoming visit.

The 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad is being commemorated by yet another seemingly interminable bloodbath a mere 500 miles west across the alluvial planes of the Kalmius, Donets and Don. The 75th anniversary of Myanmar’s independence from British rule doesn’t seem to offer much inspiration, but for those who like a bit of hocus-pocus, it’s also 100 years since the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

As is often the case, paying too much attention to all this stuff brings me back endlessly to William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, written a mere 104 years ago, which I’ve been known to quote before, but I’ve already painted myself into a rather bleak corner, so for those of you of a literary bent, it’s one of the least disturbing things readily available on the internet.

After all, it is a glorious Easter Morning as I type, and my heartfelt wishes go out to friends worldwide for Easter, Ramadan and Passover respectively, which coincide for the first time since 1990. It would be delightful to think that such an auspicious event could be marked by some kind of multi-Abrahamic spring festival, with competing falafel recipes scenting the streets of Old Jerusalem, but sadly it looks like a rather more precarious situation from all sides.

Netanyahu’s ragtag coalition of far-right religious nationalists and “judicial reformers” have continued as many feared they might, with such unpalatable actions that not only the oppressed masses of Gaza and The West Bank, but vast swathes of Israeli society, including their diplomatic service have been out on the streets for months protesting.

Oh, for a bit of colloquy rather than endless tub-thumping and sloganeering. My thought’s also go out to all of my Taiwanese and Taiwan-based friends who are likely celebrating none of the above, but are currently surrounded on at least three sides by the latest set of “military exercises”.

Talking of tub-thumping, sloganeering and rough beasts, we’ve recently been treated to the synchronised return of the two transatlantic blonde beasts who’ve so haunted the past few years in the English speaking world, but this time in the dock, rather than behind a lectern.

While bringing charges against Trump does seem to me entirely counter-productive; giving him the oxygen of publicity he constantly craves just when it appeared he was a spent balloon deflating with more of a whimper than a bang, the sorry sight of Boris, sporting for once an approximation of conventional coiffeur, shirt tucked-in and shoes shined, hunched like a petulant schoolboy in the metaphorical head-master’s office, bleating and blathering his increasingly vexed protestations for three hours seemed to signal anything but the much vaunted notion of his triumphant, Churchillian renaissance.

The point was hammered home when after returning from the call of the division bell which was supposed to herald his full-frontal assault on Sunak’s authority, such as it is, it transpired that only 21 of his amassed ranks had followed him into the breach, and that included Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fabricant; so make that 18.

Watching him being made to swear an oath on the bible, which has coincidentally never been required for any other such plaintiff, it was remarkable that it didn’t burst into flames. In this increasingly litigious age, it’s an object lesson that giving someone their day in court can often backfire, whereas just allowing them to humiliate themselves for three straight hours on live television can be far more satisfying for the rest of us.

While all this sleight-of-hand goes on in the popular press, training our eyes on ostentatious clowns and endless wars, it’s rather more worrying to see what nefarious policies various desperate and collapsing “governments” try, and often manage to push through before they inevitably get voted out.

Storming the Al Aqsa Mosque with riot police during Ramadan is one of the more transparent attempts to stoke up enough trouble to obscure widespread discontent on the domestic front, but far more insidious to this observer is the fact that the UK has in the past weeks joined the unfortunately acronymous CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership rather than the Seepy Teepee Pee), a trade-deal so toxic that both Trump and Biden, along with Bernie Sanders and countless others were all united in refusing to touch it with a barge-pole.

Whatever your thoughts on membership of NATO, at least the UK is actually situated in the general vicinity of the North Atlantic. I know that while serving briefly as Foreign Secretary, self-described “hard-man” Dominic Raaaab was taken by surprise by Dover’s proximity to France, but failing to notice that Britain is no-where near the Pacific Ocean really is remiss.

The “benefits” of this deal are negligible, even in the entirely speculative projections of a potential 0.08% increase in GDP over the next decade, whereas the much more immediate effects will be to flood the UK with substandard meat and animal products from environmentally catastrophic industrial feed-lots thousands of miles away, undermine our own farmers just as they try to come to terms with the the fall-out from leaving their biggest export market, and give vast Canadian-based pharmaceutical conglomerates the legal right to sue doctors if they don’t push enough drugs on their patients, and to sue governments if they try to legislate in any direction contrary to the plans of their corporate overlords. All in all, it’s the kind of thing which might have benefitted from a bit of open public debate, rather than being snuck through under cover of Johnson, while everyone was looking the other way.
 

Dear friends around the world,

After a long, hard winter shivering in various parts of a building-site, wrestling with French bureaucracy and enduring rather too much existential despair, spring has finally burst onto the scene around these parts. The radio tells me that the cities of France are on fire and the whole country has ground to a halt in absolute revulsion at Macron’s extra-parliamentary shenanigans, but you wouldn’t know it from here.

About ten days ago, as though someone had flicked a switch, temperatures suddenly rose ten degrees and everything started to grow. We've even had a touch of rain for the first time in months, which is helping no end after a remarkably dry winter; wildflowers carpet the floor in the woods, the ash trees are starting to push out their first tentative leaves of the season and the hum of insects is back on the breeze.

I’ve been getting myself back into the habit of playing music everyday, rather than spending all my time putting calluses on the wrong parts of my hands, and it’s been going quite well, which is always reassuring. Gigs are starting to line up for the summer, and with any luck I’ll at least be able to afford the diesel to get to them.

For anyone of a Welsh persuasion or with a penchant for Dylan Thomas, we’ll be playing Gower Folk Festival on Saturday, June 10th, for those in Surrey or thereabouts, we’re at The Horton, a beautiful new venue in Epsom, on Thursday June 15th, and for my fellow country-folk of Northamptonshire we’ve got a candlelit show for Little Ember Sessions at The Talbot Hotel in Oundle on Thursday, August 24th. There will plenty more, but for now, tickets for these shows are available, and we’d love to sell them out.

As seems be the case with many people at the moment, I’ve been really struggling with depression and overwhelming bouts of anxiety for months, not helped by an onslaught of demands for ridiculous sums of money from a plethora of intimidating acronyms, but I’m beginning to get on top of that, at least. The more disturbing French ones turned out to be an error on their part, but their automatic system continued to send me increasingly frightening demands week after week, despite endless chats with their very helpful and understanding call-centre staff. At the moment, I haven’t had one for over a month, and (touch wood) I have a feeling the message may finally have got through.

As for His Majesty’s lot, the very cheek of them informing me that I owe them for “overpayments made during the COVID measures” is a little harder to swallow. I received two payments totalling about £400 to see me through a year of lost work, when peers, cronies and assorted criminals, friends of Matt Hancock and other unsavoury characters gorged on multiple billions from the government teat, of which a mere 0.9% has been recovered or even pursued.

It may be my cut-throat business brain speaking, but it seems a slightly flawed strategy to relentlessly pursue the poor, desperate and disabled for money that they don’t have, when such fortunes have been squirrelled away all around; often by people not much brighter than the aforementioned washed-up politician, who willingly gave hundreds of thousands of incriminating WhatsApp messages to a “journalist” renowned for betraying her sources and landing them in jail. He even paid her for the privilege.

Such madness seems all the rage at the moment. At the start of last week, the 20th anniversary of the invasion and consequent destruction of Iraq was marked with great fanfare on the morning news; accompanied without a trace of irony in the triumvirate of headlines by a press-release from the UN warning that the world is at a tipping point in terms of environmental catastrophe, and to end on a positive note, a piece celebrating the order of one million incendiary shells to be shipped to Ukraine.

The cognitive dissonance required to swallow, or indeed spew, such paradoxical nuggets of information in the same breath is surely worth some sort of prize. I’m left wondering just how many times I need to drive my gas-guzzling SUV to the supermarket and back to leave the carbon-footprint of just one of these incendiary shells, which I’ve since heard are laced (or perhaps blessed) with small amounts of depleted uranium; to help the medicine go down, I suppose.

In the twenty years since the start of Bush and Blair’s (or perhaps Rove and Campbell’s - how names blur in the haze of time) ill-fated crusade for “freeman-moxy” in the Middle East, countless tons of ordinance have been rained down liberally on an ever increasing itinerary of countries, while we’re all encouraged to scrupulously separate our recyclable waste and compost teabags. Again, maybe our sights are trained in the wrong direction.

It does seem to be the season of portentous anniversaries. The 30th anniversary of the privatisation of Britain’s water infrastructure is marked by the release of literally millions of gallons of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and beaches, as the hedge funds who run the system cream off yet more dividends; liberated, as they are from decades of EU regulation, monitoring and investment which had eventually managed to undo some of the damage done by two centuries of industrial effluent.

The 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement, which brought an effective end to decades of sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland, having recently been put to the test by Johnson’s “oven-ready Brexit deal”, was celebrated with a warning of “imminent’ terrorist attacks to accompany Joe Biden’s upcoming visit.

The 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad is being commemorated by yet another seemingly interminable bloodbath a mere 500 miles west across the alluvial planes of the Kalmius, Donets and Don. The 75th anniversary of Myanmar’s independence from British rule doesn’t seem to offer much inspiration, but for those who like a bit of hocus-pocus, it’s also 100 years since the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

As is often the case, paying too much attention to all this stuff brings me back endlessly to William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, written a mere 104 years ago, which I’ve been known to quote before, but I’ve already painted myself into a rather bleak corner, so for those of you of a literary bent, it’s one of the least disturbing things readily available on the internet.

After all, it is a glorious Easter Morning as I type, and my heartfelt wishes go out to friends worldwide for Easter, Ramadan and Passover respectively, which coincide for the first time since 1990. It would be delightful to think that such an auspicious event could be marked by some kind of multi-Abrahamic spring festival, with competing falafel recipes scenting the streets of Old Jerusalem, but sadly it looks like a rather more precarious situation from all sides.

Netanyahu’s ragtag coalition of far-right religious nationalists and “judicial reformers” have continued as many feared they might, with such unpalatable actions that not only the oppressed masses of Gaza and The West Bank, but vast swathes of Israeli society, including their diplomatic service have been out on the streets for months protesting.

Oh, for a bit of colloquy rather than endless tub-thumping and sloganeering. My thought’s also go out to all of my Taiwanese and Taiwan-based friends who are likely celebrating none of the above, but are currently surrounded on at least three sides by the latest set of “military exercises”.

Talking of tub-thumping, sloganeering and rough beasts, we’ve recently been treated to the synchronised return of the two transatlantic blonde beasts who’ve so haunted the past few years in the English speaking world, but this time in the dock, rather than behind a lectern.

While bringing charges against Trump does seem to me entirely counter-productive; giving him the oxygen of publicity he constantly craves just when it appeared he was a spent balloon deflating with more of a whimper than a bang, the sorry sight of Boris, sporting for once an approximation of conventional coiffeur, shirt tucked-in and shoes shined, hunched like a petulant schoolboy in the metaphorical head-master’s office, bleating and blathering his increasingly vexed protestations for three hours seemed to signal anything but the much vaunted notion of his triumphant, Churchillian renaissance.

The point was hammered home when after returning from the call of the division bell which was supposed to herald his full-frontal assault on Sunak’s authority, such as it is, it transpired that only 21 of his amassed ranks had followed him into the breach, and that included Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fabricant; so make that 18.

Watching him being made to swear an oath on the bible, which has coincidentally never been required for any other such plaintiff, it was remarkable that it didn’t burst into flames. In this increasingly litigious age, it’s an object lesson that giving someone their day in court can often backfire, whereas just allowing them to humiliate themselves for three straight hours on live television can be far more satisfying for the rest of us.

While all this sleight-of-hand goes on in the popular press, training our eyes on ostentatious clowns and endless wars, it’s rather more worrying to see what nefarious policies various desperate and collapsing “governments” try, and often manage to push through before they inevitably get voted out.

Storming the Al Aqsa Mosque with riot police during Ramadan is one of the more transparent attempts to stoke up enough trouble to obscure widespread discontent on the domestic front, but far more insidious to this observer is the fact that the UK has in the past weeks joined the unfortunately acronymous CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership rather than the Seepy Teepee Pee), a trade-deal so toxic that both Trump and Biden, along with Bernie Sanders and countless others were all united in refusing to touch it with a barge-pole.

Whatever your thoughts on membership of NATO, at least the UK is actually situated in the general vicinity of the North Atlantic. I know that while serving briefly as Foreign Secretary, self-described “hard-man” Dominic Raaaab was taken by surprise by Dover’s proximity to France, but failing to notice that Britain is no-where near the Pacific Ocean really is remiss.

The “benefits” of this deal are negligible, even in the entirely speculative projections of a potential 0.08% increase in GDP over the next decade, whereas the much more immediate effects will be to flood the UK with substandard meat and animal products from environmentally catastrophic industrial feed-lots thousands of miles away, undermine our own farmers just as they try to come to terms with the the fall-out from leaving their biggest export market, and give vast Canadian-based pharmaceutical conglomerates the legal right to sue doctors if they don’t push enough drugs on their patients, and to sue governments if they try to legislate in any direction contrary to the plans of their corporate overlords. All in all, it’s the kind of thing which might have benefitted from a bit of open public debate, rather than being snuck through under cover of Johnson, while everyone was looking the other way.
 

Dear friends out there in the wide world, 

Solstice greetings to you all, d’rect from the cross-bones of the year, well at least that's where I started, but thanks to the merciless onslaught of time and the vagaries of internet connection, I'm sadly a day late in actually getting the word out. 

I trust you’re all doing your best to keep warm, fed and vaguely solvent in these straightened and increasingly ridiculous times. It’s been a while since I’ve turned my hand to typing, and I promise I’ll try to spare you a long political diatribe this time. I’ve been largely turning my hand to pointing, painting, plastering, insulating and generally trying to make our place vaguely habitable, and with a bit of luck, slightly warmer than outside, as the winter begins to bite. 

I’m sitting at my desk, which I’m just realising is a totally revolutionary and unfamiliar phrase for me to type, wrapped up in multiple jumpers, hat and scarf, considering whether it might be possible to type with gloves on, while watching sleek fingers of milky sunshine attempt to penetrate the thick morning fog which still sits stubbornly in the valley below.

For the first time since May 2005, I have a bedroom, or rather we have a bedroom, as it’s much more Yasmine’s than mine, but she lets me in from time to time. In fact, depending on your idea of habitable, we have four rooms, two of which are sometimes actually warm! 

The revelation of sleeping in a room rather than a vehicle after many years in a series of vans, left me lying on my back giggling for the first several times I tried it. The last bedroom I got to call my own was at our marvellous old haunted mansion on Jade Mountain Road, tucked between folds of verdant mountainside just south of Taipei, so after 17 and a half years it’s going to take a while to sink in. 

When we eventually got back here after an emotionally charged summer of heartfelt song and motorway food, we found the place buried deep in four-foot weeds and grass as high as your head. The three cats, thriving thanks to the diligent efforts of our dear neighbour, Jean-Jaques, had been happily patrolling the barns and garden, but since they had been locked out of the house, mice had been partying like there’s no tomorrow and had managed to pillage every one of the few food items we had left stashed away, including four whole packets of raw spaghetti (a small fortune in these inflationary times) and an entire carton of vegetable soup, which sat where it had been on the shelf, with a mouse-sized hole at the top of one side, and every morsel of soup cleaned meticulously from the inside.

I was left with the delightful, if unsanitary image of mice diving into the soup and re-emerging, dripping orange gloop from whiskers to tail in what must have been the rodent equivalent of a decadent Monaco pool party. Glad they got a chance to have a bit of fun before the cats were allowed back in. We don’t come across many mice anymore, well at least not whole ones. 

After a good deal of sweat and cursing, grunting and humping, the slightly dank, mouse-nibbled building site to which we returned now boasts a rather rustic kitchen, replete with antique marble-topped dressers, a sink and running water (thanks to my multitalented brother), a living room with an open fire, a study (admittedly a bit chilly to actually study in) with sofa, desk, bookshelf and pictures, and the aforementioned bedroom, (now with an actual ceiling!) which thanks to the gift of masses of incredible antique furniture from dear Martine who sold us the house, is fit for a princess. 

It’s all painted white, with oiled floors and almost a semblance of tidiness at times. The contrast with a slightly damp ply-lined van is truly remarkable, as is not having to cook dinner right next to your bed. 

The rest of the time I’ve been insulating everything I can, digging drains, pointing walls, felling the odd tree, trying to keep on top of the firewood situation and just now installing a cat-flap in our continued campaign to be warm some day. 

The cats are cheeky, thieving buggers, but very efficient mousers and extremely sweet (as long as you’re not a mouse). Raphael is a massive black lion of a cat, with a resplendent slightly ginger mane and pantaloons, Rose is very gentle, unless food is involved, in which case she growls like a Rottweiler, and Mehitabel is tiny, fleet of foot, very personable and absolutely ferocious when it comes down to it. They rule the roost, but I must admit we’re thoroughly enjoying their company.

All of this has mostly kept me from making music since the end of the summer, apart from the odd visit from my niece and nephew who won’t leave without a bit of a singalong and some occasionally musical and endlessly interesting double-harmonica action, and a delightful visit from song-writer extraordinaire, Matthew Robb, and Astrud who popped in on their way from Köln to Andalucia, but with any luck, that will change now we have some rooms to be in. We’re not blessed with much in the way of internet as yet, but I will work on the possibility of the odd live-stream as soon as we make some progress on that front. 

I’m starting to assemble a few dates for next summer’s touring schedule and will let you know as soon as soon as it begins to take shape, but I could, as ever use any help I can get finding new, or indeed old contacts for places and people who still like to pay for a concert from time to time. 

This past summer, Nye and Piotr were on superlative form, as was Sascha on the German leg, and it was true joy to play for so many of you. Though I love to spend a quiet few months building in the fresh country air, I miss you all terribly and eagerly await the next chance we get to make some Djukella music. 

A particular treat was spending ten days or so in the company of our old bandmate Dana Wylie, and her ten-year-old daughter, Anna. I’m currently on the hunt for any videos of us playing to share with you. It’s an amazing feeling to step back on stage with people after 15 years and find it feels as though no time has passed at all, though there’s a fair bit more pretending you know the material, which is also fun. Thanks immensely to all of you and all of the lovely folks who hosted us along the way.

Since I last wrote, as far as I’m told in the media, the world at large continues to spiral towards oblivion, but out the window in the real world the tractors putter on by and the cowbells clank gently in the background. It reminds me of a Bill Hicks routine from the early 90s about watching more than 27 hours of CNN in a day. 

Israel, and indeed most of Palestine are about to be taken over by the most unsavoury far-right cabal, being as they are the only coalition able to return Bibi Netinyahu to the position to which he has become accustomed. Ever the mercenary, but he does enjoy receiving all those gifts. Turning the culture-wars up to eleven, they have decided on the very “meta” strategy of appointing a man who has already been tried and convicted of inciting racial hatred, as Minister for Police, putting the shenanigans of the most rabid American racists in the shade. 

In the States, Biden’s desperately trying to rush as many munitions as possible to Ukraine before he loses control of Congress, whilst Trump soldiers on, attacking friend and foe alike, as perhaps it starts to dawn on him, that making America orange again might not be such a smooth ride against the wishes of his erstwhile backer, Rupert Murdoch, who in time-honoured fashion seems to have taken a shine to a new and younger nutjob. 

In Turkey, Erdogan continues to prosecute anyone who may some day be able to challenge his unflinching grip on power, while somehow managing to straddle the “Iron”, or rather Information Curtain, remaining a loyal member of NATO (a fair way from the North Atlantic, one might note) and a key ally of Russia as the two use the Ukrainian population to slug out their differences over access to rare-earth metals in a cruel and brutal winter. 

Iran seems intent on demonising, imprisoning and even executing a whole generation of their population to assuage the outdated dogma of yet another Cabal of crusty old zealots, whilst bankrolling their efforts by flogging arms to Putin. 

I may be seen as a fool and a communist to suggest such a thing, but the correlation between corrupt regimes bankrolling their crooked schemes by selling weapons to other corrupt regimes, with which to oppress their own, and indeed other populations, seems hard to ignore, when the stated intention is to “enhance peace and security”. One is tempted to speculate that selling less arms to less deranged people might yield more positive results, and reduce the carbon footprint of those involved to boot, which is apparently another stated intention of the current “plan”. 

Here in France, or rather over there in Q’atar, Macron seemed as at ease with his hosts and the slippery Infantino as he was keen to be pictured as much as possible consoling the actual King of France, Killian Mbappe after France’s defeat to Argentina in the Football World Cup Final. Being more of a rugby man myself, I’m often left wondering when watching football, why they spend so much time hanging around and kicking it to their own goal-keeper, but it was a deeply enjoyable match, involving a couple of the most amazing talents since Pélé and plenty of excitement. 

So compelling was it that I ended up watching the bizarre spectacle of the “Awards Ceremony” when the beneficent host, Sheikh-Yermanibags, was finally allowed to strut around with all the other moneybags, fat-cats and cooperate relations managers, and be snapped with slightly confused footballers trying to negotiate the oversized stage.

Talking of corrupt and illegitimate regimes, and lacking the time and inclination to take you any further around the world for now, we return to the UK and its latest “government”. Ever since the inevitable but still remarkably rapid implosion of The Liz Truss Experiment , I have tried, mostly in vain, to curb my news addiction, and find informative things to listen to, as I go about my day. 

I thoroughly enjoy the Alexei Sayle Podcast, particularly the more recent episodes, which become more and more informative by the month, as well as Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar on BBC Radio 4, which is a comedy tour de force. If you weren't around in the 80s or have yet to discover Alexei Sayle, check him out. 

Through Alexei I've recently discovered Blind Boy Boat Club, which is a whole other kettle of fish, with a delightful Irish lilt. If anyone can suggest any more inspiring and or entertaining podcasts, or other audio entertainment to keep my mind working as I re-point walls I'm all ears. 

The fall of Johnson and the cheese lady in turn, made for such compelling farce, wrapped as it was in regal pomp and splendour, it was difficult to tune out, as was the case in the years of Herr Drumpf across the pond. Every news bulletin of the day would present yet another fresh revelation of corruption and incompetence, mendacity and down-right dishonesty that I was left wondering whether the newly unemployed writers of Neighbours had been hired en-masse from Melbourne by the powers that be, to come up with a distraction compelling enough to allow them to raid everyone’s pension funds unnoticed. 

After the galloping pantomime of frauds and charlatans that characterise the past few years, it seems, certainly in the UK media, things are settling back down to the background hum of powerful men saying poisonous things about Meghan Markle, comfortable people complaining about desperate refugees “invading” our beaches, hedge-fund managers telling nurses they should work harder for less and be happy with applause for dinner, as the deeply corrupt and roundly disgraced architect of those very nurses’ COVID related PTSD, Hat Mancock himself is paid £400,000 to nibble dingo-bollocks in a holiday resort, “to raise awareness of dyslexia”. The brave and the good are shown nothing but scorn whilst  the wicked are showered with gifts, or slime, as the case may be, not mention book-deals. 

The word in the British press is that relations between Britain and France, or rather between Sunak and Macron, are far less frosty that under the regimes of the precedent blonde beasts, whose bread and butter was taunting the French, while failing to mention that both Sunak and Macron until very recently were colleagues at Goldman Sachs. 

It’s so often the omissions that shed light, rather than the juicy nuggets we’re ostentatiously thrown. 

So if you've managed to make it down this far, thanks for reading. 

To wrap up this rant in a way which combines investigative journalism and decency with political intrigue and our Qatari paymasters, for some reason, the entire UK press, (even, to my great disappointment, Private Eye) has conveniently failed to notice Al Jazeera's recent offering from their award-winning (and editorially independent) investigative journalism team, entitled "The Labour Files". 

If you're at all concerned with honesty, integrity and the right to a fair trial, it makes for some pretty intriguing viewing. And if you're worried it's another socialist diatribe, here's a Tory to tell you all about it.

If anyone wants to buy some music, hire us for a gig, commission a video, song, article, poem or novel, or just throw a couple of quid in the hat; times are tough and every little helps. Everything is available at jezhellard.net and I'm always up for a bit of correspondence, even if you're not a brass penny to your name. And if anyone fancies a trip to south-west France, let us know. 

With best wishes for a fine festive season, and perhaps a more compassionate new year. Looking forward to hearing from you all in due course. 

With much love from down here, 

Jez

Dear friends,

Greetings from my first opportunity to communicate in some time, and welcome to all who’ve joined the mailing list over the summer. 

As the nights draw in, the moon grows fat, and westlin winds usher in a whole new era, I find myself between showers, watching quivering cobwebs in the slant light of early autumn. Well, at least I did on Thursday morning. 

It already seemed a poignant and significant moment when I sat down to begin writing, trying to come to terms with what Nye would call “post-exertional malaise” (after a summer spent frantically careening between stages, sharing truly magical musical moments, interspersed by miles of road and regular bouts of catastrophic news) and an ominous, fluttering sense of existential dread which I couldn’t quite explain. 

I’d just launched into the first couple of paragraphs when I turned on the radio, and everything changed. 

Well not everything. I was still sitting at a desk, in a shed in the rain, but from an editorial point of view the goalposts had not just moved, but entirely transmogrified. We now find ourselves at the dawn of the new Carolean age, bidding an inevitable but curiously surprising farewell to one of the only constants universal to the lives of the vast majority of the world’s population.

The late Queen Elizabeth II, or endearingly, “Gary” to her grandsons, has put in the most extraordinary lifetime of commitment and total dedication to her duty in all its facets. Whatever one’s views on republicanism, monarchy, Diana, Meghan or indeed Pastafari, there is no denying that. 

My heart goes out to all the many people around the world who have held her dear for so long. My heart also goes out to the residents and associates of the James Smith Cree Nation, Saskatchewan in general and the Prince Albert area in particular, the beleaguered populations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen and elsewhere whose woes have suddenly been wiped off the front or indeed back pages, engulfed in a sea of circumstance. 

Amongst the endless pomp and drear of the constant multi-channel take-over of the airwaves since the news broke, I have heard truly inspiring anecdotes from a plethora of the world’s citizenry, along with a really very funny story from Theresa May, delivered with beat-perfect comic timing, pausing to take in incidental laughs as they came, about dropping cheese on the floor at a royal picnic. She really seems to have relaxed into herself now that her successor has managed to make even more of a hash of the job than she did. 

The fact that he was allowed to hang around despoiling the beaches of Europe, joyriding in fighter-jets and generally fiddling while the world burns as “caretaker Prime Minister” (has a phrase ever been so misplaced?) for just long enough to exceed her three years and thirteen days in office tells as much about the driverless inertia of our delicquessent political system as it does about his own shameless and unending shallowness, pettiness and vanity. 

Talking of driverless inertia, the malfunctioning robot currently “in charge” of governing The King’s Dominions has now been afforded a couple of weeks to let it all sink in and perhaps even come up with some kind of plan to stop us descending into rampant cannibalism before Christmas. 

After a seemingly interminable summer of repeating the same five lines to small gatherings of geriatrics the length and breadth of the land, as Dishy Rishi shrank visibly before her eyes, and the press allowed her to bask in fake praise from those hungry for a prime job, anyone might have been lulled into such a trancelike state, akin to a mixomatosis rabbit in the headlights. 

But Liz Truss was rather hurtled back to reality through a series of simple twists of fate, conspiring not just to rain on her parade, both figuratively and literally, but to engulf it in another ostensibly ceremonial, but in reality far more consequential series of actual parades.

I have in the past several years been increasingly amused at the subtle, yet killer wit of the late Queen, including the revelation that she spent a fair amount of time chatting away in a convincing Scouse accent and revelled in being called Gary. 

Notwithstanding his beautifully crafted tribute to her in The House of Commons (if only he could have applied some of his evident rhetorical skill and deft oratory to being PM), the way Her Majesty has managed to avoid having to be in a room with Bojo the disgraced clown, right up to the point where he had to trek up to Aberdeenshire in a thunderstorm to be “seen off” (his words, not mine), has been an exemplary lesson in quiet diplomacy. 

But as is so often the way for those with uncanny good fortune, Boris breezily gave his deluded victim speech outside Number 10 in the bright morning sunshine (where he managed to suggest, through perhaps slightly under-researched classical allusion, that he might return as a proto-fascist dictator to put down a popular uprising), before flying between the looming storm-heads to Aberdeen and thence Balmoral for a last audience, leaving poor Truss to fly up through all the storms, and what must have been quite some turbulence, to find Aberdeen airport shrouded in fog; and unable to land, herself 20 minutes late for her first, and sadly as it turns out, last audience with The Queen. 

With the formalities completed, she was then whisked back through the rain to Aberdeen, and back through the storm clouds to London, where the welcoming party had been standing ready, quietly absorbing pints of drizzle in their suit jackets, a bin-bag unceremoniously covering the microphones on the lectern as anxious sound-engineers fidgeted nearby. 

Just as the environmentally questionable eight-car motorcade hove into view on the BBC’s live helicopter camera, bearing down on central London, the heavens opened, the welcoming party bolted for the Cabinet Office in a soggy and chaotic melée of umbrellas, and the beleaguered lectern was carted back into Number 10, much to the relief of the sound techs.

What followed was a fascinating improvised commentary of the progress of eight armour-plated SUVs on a seemingly random jaunt around the landmarks of the Thames. “It looks like they’re crossing over Lambeth Bridge”, “But that’s the south side of the river”, “Oh yes, there’s the Bishop’s Palace”, “One of the finest gardens in all of London, don’t you know”, and now settling into the tour guide roll, “And here’s St Thomas’ Hospital” etc etc. 

They managed to handle the slightly comic situation without betraying any noticeable mirth, and within ten minutes there was window enough in the rain for the motorcade to sweep in, applauded roundly by the hastily reassembled but still sodden welcoming party, and for Truss to dash out and give a fairly concise speech at a re-fettled lectern, before proceeding through the famous door with her gently beaming husband. 

The superhuman effort it must have taken for The Queen to make sure she was still there in September to expertly conduct her last official duty and make sure the hand-over of power was incontrovertibly complete before the inevitable turbulence in the wake of such a monumental historical figure, is truly remarkable, as was the lady herself.

Truss was afforded a fairly uneventful first Prime Minister’s Questions and one night’s sleep before her big day to announce her economically dubious plan to pay fossil fuel producers from the public purse to continue to extort vast profits from the desperate poor...

...but it was not to be. 

Moments after she had finished her initial statement, she was shown a note which left her looking as shocked as when the interviewer collapsed suddenly in the middle of one of the televised slanging matches earlier in the summer, and all plans were out of the window. 

Since then she appears to be managing pretty well with the formalities of the situation and though a touch star-struck, managed to be very gracious when the similarly discombobulated nascent King Charles accidentally implied that he’d been dreading meeting her for ages. 

I thought he gave a fine tribute to his mother and a well crafted speech in his first public address. Despite tiring of the continuous stream of tribute on all available wavelengths, it’s refreshing to hear some of these speeches in this strange calm where the rabid, amoral British press are forced to put on kid-gloves for a fortnight and even leave the Sussexes alone for a while. 

Pardon my digression into blow-by-blow political commentary, but it is such a momentous and precarious time on so many levels that I find myself needing to process it all in some way.

Last weekend, we bid farewell to Nye’s dad, in the company of all the Parsons and a wonderful collective of Wellingborough legends, at The Victoria Centre, where Les spent many years working and promoting music, colloquy and activism amongst the smidgens. 

It was a lovely day, filled with friends, songs and fine memories. Deepest thanks to Ceri and the whole gang for all the hard work, to Yasmine for coming all the way from Thanet, to Kevin from braving the Atlantic twice in a month, to Keir and Family, Karl and Family, Gerry Elliot, Simon Andrews, and above all Nye for holding it all together and playing bass with every band from lunch til closing. 

Last week the full Parsons, inlaws and outlaws included, headed up to Kinder Scout to scatter Les' ashes to the winds. Good on you all. You're a fine bunch.

Thanks to all of the festivals, hosts, promoters, friends and fans who have made it such a special summer, and particularly to Owain and Sue for looking after us all so well and being amongst the hardest working people in show business. 

On the subject of Owain and Sue, Priston Festival happens next weekend, September 16th-18th, in the delightful village of Priston, 4 miles south-west of Bath. The line-up is great. It’s free to all, and you will be in the hands of the finest hosts around, so if you’re anywhere near Bath, go and check it out. 

When time allows, I will write a little about our recent musical adventures, and perhaps about what is to come, but for now, from the dawn of a new era, I bid you adieu. 

With much love from the edge of the road, 

Jez

Dear friends, 

Greetings from the heart of summer, and a brief moment where I don’t have to drive the van. As the world burns and a panoply of political incompetents jostle for primacy in the race to take soup off the poor to pay for weapons for peace, we at The Djukella Orchestra have been blessed with the chance to sing meaningful words to humans who want to listen, catch up with dear friends for the first time in years and revisit some of this island’s most delightful corners. 

Since I last wrote, we’ve covered many miles and shared profound experiences with wonderful audiences; in the trapeze-laden splendour of Hatch Court, amongst the banners of Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival, the balmy sunshine pf Pig’s Ear Folk Ale, the warm bosom of community that is The Square & Compass and lastly the legendarily discerning Monday night crowd at The Bell in Bath. 

Nye and Piotr have been on superlative form, and it really has been a treat. We even got the chance to catch a whole half concert of the great John, Kaz and Joe Devine, and spend a wonderful night and morning in fine musical company, to the accompaniment of Simon Sturt’s award-winning curries and freshly harvested scollops, before heading on our separate ways. Such a pleasure to see you all, and thanks to Sandy for putting up with such a full house.

Now I have a brief moment to try and get on top of all the publicity for our forthcoming tour with the great Dana Wylie, fresh from the green fields of Canada, and get as much laundry as possible washed and dried before I have to head out in search of Nye and d’rect to Cambridge Folk Festival. 

We’ll be playing on Saturday July 30th at 2pm in The Club Tent, thanks to Les Ray of The Bridge. If you’re on site, come and join us. It’s the first time we’ve had the chance to play even a wee sliver of Djukella music at Cambridge, so it’ll be lovely to have a few familiar faces in the crowd. 

As soon as we finish at Cambridge, we have to high-tail it to Bedford for the Blender Takeover of The Quarry Theatre as part of the Bedford Fringe. Tickets are pay-what-you-can. We’ll be playing at 5:30pm in the company of the inimitable Fiona Fey. If you, or anyone you know are in the Bedford area, come and support this celebration of local grass-roots culture. Thanks to Alan and the whole team for all the hard work organising it. 

Next Friday (August 5th) we’ll be playing at The Locks Inn Community Pub in Geldeston; on the River Waveney, dividing (or perhaps uniting) Norfolk and Suffolk. We’re not from ‘round there, so if you know anyone in East Anglia, send them along. It’s a beautiful corner of the world, and has recently been rehabilitated by the community to its former glory.

Then we will be joining forces with Dana Wylie, one of Canada’s finest songwriters, for the first time in over a decade for a ten-date tour. 

She is a powerhouse of musical and poetic stylings, described by Canada’s national folk magazine, Penguin Eggs as “the only artist this critic has felt comfortable comparing favourably to Joni Mitchell in the scope of her talent EVER.” 

If that sounds appealing to you or anyone you can think of, please get your tickets for whichever show is most convenient, and help us spread the word. What with paying for venue-hire and the exorbitant price of diesel, it’s hard to balance the books, so getting your tickets in advance really helps to save a bit of nail-biting at our end.

Tickets for all shows are available here. Please tell your friends and help us make a success of this! 

I trust that you all managed to keep yourselves cool during the crazy heatwave. Nye and I were hurtling around between gigs and the van was running a bit hotter than I’d like it to, so we had to do the best part of a thousand miles with the heaters on full-blast and the windows open, to cool the engine, which certainly is a particular kind of torture, but we survived. 

By the height of the heat on the Tuesday, I was luckily parked up with a day to spare, but living in a van doesn’t offer much respite in 40 degrees, and even in the shade by the river the wind was hot. I found that regularly getting in the river then drying gradually in the hot wind was by far the best way to deal with it, as the van had soaked up so much of the heat that being in there at all was starting to cook my brain. 

For company I had the bizarre juxtaposition of Radio 4 providing me with the endless squabbling from various deluded wannabe statespersons, hell-bent on infinite financial growth and scoffing at progress of all sorts, from environmental to social, sexual to racial. 

The suspension of disbelief required to listen sequentially to the headlines of "devastating wild-fires and apocalyptic heatwaves", "record prices destroying desperate people living in poorly insulated and overpriced houses", "record profits for fossil fuel companies and the need to reduce the tax they pay whilst simultaneously increasing the tax burden on their poor customers", without pointing out any kind of relationship between these very topics is simply astonishing. 

Then to be told by barely-sentient politicians that the only way to solve our problems is to “grow” our dysfunctional and profligate “economy”, ask Saudi Arabia to take a break from bombing Yemeni children to ramp up oil-production, and sell more weapons to anyone who’ll buy them, is frankly insulting.

As far as I can see, shutters are a bloody good idea, public drinking fountains and deliberately planted and well coppiced shade trees, meeting your neighbours (particularly those who are alone or otherwise vulnerable) and checking in with them now and again, and beginning to have discussions with neighbours and local authorities about forming local resilience plans are all fairly elementary first steps. As well as conserving and collecting water, and planting as many trees and wildflowers as possible. 

We have the power to make this a much more hospitable environment; we just need to realise we can’t leave it to self-serving cretins to lead the way.

Anyway, that’s enough of my ranting for now. Thoroughly looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible over the next weeks. 

If you’re able, please get your tickets through the “shows” page of the website, your music through the “shop” page, share a video with a friend who’s never heard us and encourage one or two people to sign up for this mailing list. 

I know I’m demanding, but so is the life of a musical tyrant. 

With much love from this brief moment off the road, 

Jez

Dear friends, 

Greetings from the heart of summer, and a brief moment where I don’t have to drive the van. As the world burns and a panoply of political incompetents jostle for primacy in the race to take soup off the poor to pay for weapons for peace, we at The Djukella Orchestra have been blessed with the chance to sing meaningful words to humans who want to listen, catch up with dear friends for the first time in years and revisit some of this island’s most delightful corners. 

Since I last wrote, we’ve covered many miles and shared profound experiences with wonderful audiences; in the trapeze-laden splendour of Hatch Court, amongst the banners of Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival, the balmy sunshine pf Pig’s Ear Folk Ale, the warm bosom of community that is The Square & Compass and lastly the legendarily discerning Monday night crowd at The Bell in Bath. 

Nye and Piotr have been on superlative form, and it really has been a treat. We even got the chance to catch a whole half concert of the great John, Kaz and Joe Devine, and spend a wonderful night and morning in fine musical company, to the accompaniment of Simon Sturt’s award-winning curries and freshly harvested scollops, before heading on our separate ways. Such a pleasure to see you all, and thanks to Sandy for putting up with such a full house.

Now I have a brief moment to try and get on top of all the publicity for our forthcoming tour with the great Dana Wylie, fresh from the green fields of Canada, and get as much laundry as possible washed and dried before I have to head out in search of Nye and d’rect to Cambridge Folk Festival. 

We’ll be playing on Saturday July 30th at 2pm in The Club Tent, thanks to Les Ray of The Bridge. If you’re on site, come and join us. It’s the first time we’ve had the chance to play even a wee sliver of Djukella music at Cambridge, so it’ll be lovely to have a few familiar faces in the crowd. 

As soon as we finish at Cambridge, we have to high-tail it to Bedford for the Blender Takeover of The Quarry Theatre as part of the Bedford Fringe. Tickets are pay-what-you-can. We’ll be playing at 5:30pm in the company of the inimitable Fiona Fey. If you, or anyone you know are in the Bedford area, come and support this celebration of local grass-roots culture. Thanks to Alan and the whole team for all the hard work organising it. 

Next Friday (August 5th) we’ll be playing at The Locks Inn Community Pub in Geldeston; on the River Waveney, dividing (or perhaps uniting) Norfolk and Suffolk. We’re not from ‘round there, so if you know anyone in East Anglia, send them along. It’s a beautiful corner of the world, and has recently been rehabilitated by the community to its former glory.

Then we will be joining forces with Dana Wylie, one of Canada’s finest songwriters, for the first time in over a decade for a ten-date tour. 

She is a powerhouse of musical and poetic stylings, described by Canada’s national folk magazine, Penguin Eggs as “the only artist this critic has felt comfortable comparing favourably to Joni Mitchell in the scope of her talent EVER.” 

If that sounds appealing to you or anyone you can think of, please get your tickets for whichever show is most convenient, and help us spread the word. What with paying for venue-hire and the exorbitant price of diesel, it’s hard to balance the books, so getting your tickets in advance really helps to save a bit of nail-biting at our end.

Tickets for all shows are available here. Please tell your friends and help us make a success of this! 

I trust that you all managed to keep yourselves cool during the crazy heatwave. Nye and I were hurtling around between gigs and the van was running a bit hotter than I’d like it to, so we had to do the best part of a thousand miles with the heaters on full-blast and the windows open, to cool the engine, which certainly is a particular kind of torture, but we survived. 

By the height of the heat on the Tuesday, I was luckily parked up with a day to spare, but living in a van doesn’t offer much respite in 40 degrees, and even in the shade by the river the wind was hot. I found that regularly getting in the river then drying gradually in the hot wind was by far the best way to deal with it, as the van had soaked up so much of the heat that being in there at all was starting to cook my brain. 

For company I had the bizarre juxtaposition of Radio 4 providing me with the endless squabbling from various deluded wannabe statespersons, hell-bent on infinite financial growth and scoffing at progress of all sorts, from environmental to social, sexual to racial. 

The suspension of disbelief required to listen sequentially to the headlines of "devastating wild-fires and apocalyptic heatwaves", "record prices destroying desperate people living in poorly insulated and overpriced houses", "record profits for fossil fuel companies and the need to reduce the tax they pay whilst simultaneously increasing the tax burden on their poor customers", without pointing out any kind of relationship between these very topics is simply astonishing. 

Then to be told by barely-sentient politicians that the only way to solve our problems is to “grow” our dysfunctional and profligate “economy”, ask Saudi Arabia to take a break from bombing Yemeni children to ramp up oil-production, and sell more weapons to anyone who’ll buy them, is frankly insulting.

As far as I can see, shutters are a bloody good idea, public drinking fountains and deliberately planted and well coppiced shade trees, meeting your neighbours (particularly those who are alone or otherwise vulnerable) and checking in with them now and again, and beginning to have discussions with neighbours and local authorities about forming local resilience plans are all fairly elementary first steps. As well as conserving and collecting water, and planting as many trees and wildflowers as possible. 

We have the power to make this a much more hospitable environment; we just need to realise we can’t leave it to self-serving cretins to lead the way.

Anyway, that’s enough of my ranting for now. Thoroughly looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible over the next weeks. 

If you’re able, please get your tickets through the “shows” page of the website, your music through the “shop” page, share a video with a friend who’s never heard us and encourage one or two people to sign up for this mailing list. 

I know I’m demanding, but so is the life of a musical tyrant. 

With much love from this brief moment off the road, 

Jez