109: Too much music

Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and nine, I hope you’re well.

Thank you very much for reading these newsletters and supporting my writing, it means the world to me.

I don’t want to be talking music here BUT you may have already seen: I’m making beautiful limited edition 12” records of two old Chris T-T albums: London Is Sinking (2003) and 9 Red Songs (2005, celebrating its twentieth anniversary). This is the first time either album has been available on vinyl.

Pre-orders launched on Friday and they’re going great guns, so if you’re interested in buying one (or both!) please don’t hesitate — they’re officially out on Fri 14th November, but pre-order today to avoid disappointment.

More broadly, I’ve been involved in so much music-making over the past few weeks, across various projects since Glasto really, it’s disoriented me from anything else, like socialising, or hustling for paid work gigs, but especially creative writing — and I’m badly missing that solitary quiet buzz only writing time brings. Right back to it in September, for sure.

Probably the heat too, right?

With the 25/26 Premier League football season upon us, if you run a Fantasy Premier League team and you’d like to join the Border Crossing league, the code is: y0cvow.

On we roll.

xx

appearances

Tomorrow, Monday 18th August, Jim Bob plays a live radio session on Steve Lamacq’s BBC 6Music show from 4pm. I’ll play piano and a bit of fuzzy bass guitar (not both at once). It’s very exciting to go back to Maida Vale 4, a glorious studio that I had assumed I’d never get to revisit.

Saturday 23rd August, Jim Bob also does an in-store performance and signing at Rough Trade East, up London, for his 2x album release day. We’re playing Automatic in full and due to a technical error there are still a few tickets.

Saturday 20th September, I’m performing a solo Chris T-T set at the lovely little SeptemberSong festival, in Oxfordshire. This is a family-run psych/folk gem with a fantastic lineup, full of old music friends I haven’t seen for ages. I’ll also join an early afternoon discussion panel on the current relationship between politics and music.

gems

1

Stewart Lee’s new five part radio series for Artworks, ‘What Happened to Counter-Culture?’ has started, currently exclusive to BBC Sounds. Shirley Collins, Iain Sinclair, Brian Eno, Allen Ginsberg, Olivia Laing, all show up early doors. Lee pulls on his key threads, so however its arguments may unfold (whether or not it can escape BBC revisionist tendencies) it is already an enriching dip into the twentieth century.

2

Two pals of Rifa’s, Tia and Reshma, have launched a great (pretty sexy) transatlantic podcast exploring their long distance friendship and lives as single, working, creative women in the UK and USA. Cuntiosity took all of three episodes for them to deep-dive into the etymology of words for vagina. Loose and un-produced, chatting via Zoom, their chemistry drives it along.

3

I love essays that ask children questions and actually listen to the answers. Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt, writing for The Atlantic came up with ‘What Kids Told Us About How To Get Them Off Their Phones’ and it’s vastly more insightful than 99% of “kids on their phones” handwringing articles.

4

Oumia Boualam’s Instagram thread ‘Colonial-BS Journal’ tells the story of the Black Panthers’ hugely effective ‘free breakfast for school children’ program, which was destroyed (by force) by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

5

Interesting episode of Not Just The Tudors podcast about the Virginia Company exchanging British brides for American tobacco in the 1620s.

potato gems

• If you’re up at Edinburgh Fringe, there’s an Italian show on called Tale Of A Potato, by theatre company Batisfera, which runs through to Sunday 24th in Playground 3 at ZOO Playground. It’s a ‘tabletop show’ for an audience of thirty. There are still tickets for Weds, Thurs, Sat and Sun.

get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey

always there

If you could do with a creativity/life balance reset, check out my Creativity Counselling service.

Try my other (irregular) newsletter Double Chorus which is what I think about, when I think about music.

Refigure podcast has returned for series eight, with me and Rifa.

Check out the Border Crossing Press shop.

My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag.

Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.

All my love,
Chris
x