London End of Trip from John

The final full day of the trip and we actually got somewhere 30 minutes early instead of an hour late. Ajanta Music is Robin and Paul Simon. Both were fixtures on the 1980s New Wave scene. Paul was in Cowboys International among other groups. Robin played in Ultravox and Magazine. But in the 90s they got involved with the Ibiza house scene and started creating an ambient counterpart. The results are on their debut album, And Now We Dream. Paul lives in a small terrace house from 1881 and they crammed percussion, guitars and computers along with Jeff & I into a 10×10 room and played a wonderful set. Robin in particular unleashed delicate guitar lines with a raga fringe, often using an e-bow.
Then off to our final interviews of the day, this time on Subway. Jeff went off to see Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy and I went to visit Bombay Dub Orchestra. BDO was the Echoes CD of the Month in February.
Bombay Dub Orchestra

It was fun seeing Garry Hughes again. Kimberly and I had interviewed Garry back in 1986 for Totally Wired, when he had his only solo albums out, Sacred Cities and Ancient Evenings. Since then, he’s produced Euphoria and worked on records with Björk, the Art of Noise and many others. He was joined by Andrew T. MacKay, a delightfully smart-assed composer, arranger and keyboardist. In Andrews living room, we talked about the genesis of BDO and the delicate and ethereal music they created in a Bollywood studio in Bombay.
The trip over, they took me out to a local pub where I promptly got drunk on musical conversation and two hard ciders. Then Andrew’s beautiful Indian girlfriend, actress and director Meneka Das came in and insisted I have another. I did. It was the first time in four days I’d been able to kick back and enjoy the fun side of London.
That evening Jeff and I made a token visit to Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. Traditionally it’s an hours-long pilgrimage, but we were both too exhausted to really browse, though I did see that Roger Eno slipped out another CD without telling us. Transparencies .

We’re back home now and our luggage even made the trip with us. Look for all this materiel, 14 interviews and concertsrecorded in 4 days to start appearing in June.

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