BOOK COMING ON

9 March 2006

I can feel a book coming on. You know, like when you get the first inclinations you might need a shit? It will be a book about The17. It may also be a gauntlet thrown down on to the ground in front of your feet. I don’t know how big a book it’s going to be, won’t know until it is done. As I get bits of it written I will put it up, raw and unedited, at www.the17.org

I had my suspicions that this might be happening because this morning before I set out on the long day’s drive zigzagging up the land, I went into a WH Smiths to buy a couple of Red & Black lined A4 notebooks and a sixpack of pencils.

The drive has taken me from northeast London, up the A11 to my workshop in Norwich, where I met up with work colleague John Hirst and loaded up the Land Rover. We headed west on the A47 across the Fens to Peterborough, then up the Great North Road to here, Scotch Corner.

Scotch Corner is a roundabout on the A1 a few miles north of Catterick Barracks and a few miles south of Darlington. As well as a roundabout there is a hotel, Scotch Corner Hotel. When I was a kid and lived in Scotland and we were driving down to our granny’s in Norwich, we would drive via Penrith over the Pennines to Scotch Corner, then down the A1. Once we stopped off at this hotel for my mum and dad to have a coffee or something. I thought it was posh. It isn’t, or at least it isn’t now. John Hirst and I pulled into the Scotch Corner Hotel about 30 minutes ago, it was gone midnight. We had to hammer on the door for some time before the night porter came. We negotiated a deal on a couple of beds.

I am now in my room, cup of tea on the bedside cabinet, notebook open, pencil in hand and this feeling that a book is coming on is getting intense. As I said, this book will be about The17, what it is and why, and all the strands of thought that have led up to me instigating The17. In it I will also document my attempts to have performed all 17 of the scores I’ve written for The17. There may be a lot of reaching back over the years trying to work out what it is that music means to me and how I’ve got to this point where I seem to have this urge to discard everything that has gone before.

Tomorrow morning we will be on a ferry sailing out of the Tyne on to the North Sea. The book writing proper will start then. I will give myself 12 months to get it done. Not that I will be writing all the time, just when moments make themselves available as I get on with the other things in life. The remit will be left loose, just see what comes out of the pencil, just as long as it somehow explores The17, how I got here and where it might be going.

Another sip of tea, another thought. The pact I will make with myself is this: I will come back to this hotel at Scotch Corner on this very date in 2007, book myself into a room, read everything I’ve written over the previous 12 months, toss out anything that seems irrelevant, put what is left into some sort of order, and that will be the book.

As for the gauntlet that you may perceive to be lying at your feet, once you’ve read the book I hope you will pick it up and rise to the challenge of making music that supersedes or even makes redundant what I am setting out to do with The17.