Yeah, why not?

Well the last YMO person I saw, was Harry Hosono. That was when I was living out in Tokyo, in 1993 I think it was. He came to dinner at a friend of Emi’s and mine, the house where Emi and I were actually staying. That was the last time I saw Harry. I was ill, I was suffering from a virus I’d caught, I had to stay in bed through the dinner party and just popped my head through the door to say hi to him. Sandi I saw quite often, when I was out there at that time. She’s fine last I heard from her. Hajime, I haven’t seen for a while. Obviously, I married Yukihiro Takahashi’s ex- wife, so I see her quite often! Oh, and I saw Ryuichi, maybe not last time he came to England, but the time before, which is in the last three years.

I did a few back in the eighties, I think the first one I did was for a company called Centra Hi-Fi and then I did one for Goblin Rio vacuum cleaners! One for American Express, that was when the Olympics were held in Korea. I did three for Toyota cars, all at the same time. AT&T telephones in the States, I don’t think that one ever went out in the form it was intended. Then recently, the Xpedior ads which were shown In America. But that’s it, this isn’t something I’ve gone out of my way to do, people just happen to call up occasionally, saying they’d like me to create some music for an advert. So I do it if it’s an interesting enough project, but I haven’t made a job out of it.

Haven’t heard from David in a long time. I know what he’s up to from the fact we share the same manager. David lives in America now, so I haven’t seen him for a long time, as I don’t get over there, but I do know how he is and that things are okay. He’s a family man these days.

There’s so little that’s worth watching. Often I sit there watching total rubbish, just because I need to be in a stupor for an hour or two, after thinking about music all day. I did like ‘One Foot In The Grave’, possibly because I’m moving towards that age group. I've been watching the re-screenings of that on satellite TV, but Victor Meldrew recently got written out forever from the story, so that’s finished. I don’t know, there are odd documentaries that crop up now and again, I certainly don’t watch any soap operas, I just detest soap operas, I'm hopeless when you get into one of those conversations with people, and they ask if I watched ‘Corry’ last night, because I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. So TV is something that I watch, but it is not something that I'm proud of watching.

I am interested, but my family is somehow lost in the mists of time. There’s only really my mum and my brother alive from the immediate family. I've got recollections of my father telling me things about his life as a young man and so on, still quite vivid with me. He was brought up in Newcastle and worked in the shipyards briefly, then moved away to Yorkshire as a young man, and cycled all the way, sleeping in hedgerows. They were always fantastic stories that he told me, which I tend to believe were true. I don’t really know much beyond my immediate parents, I've got vague recollections of my grandfather, which I think I've written about in a diary entry one time. My grandmother survived some way into my teenage years. The distant ancestry is a deep and dark mystery, although my father told me we were related to Admiral Lord Nelson.

The older you get, the more nostalgic you get. You start to think about the golden age, or what you perceive as your own golden age. I do try to keep nostalgia at bay with a sharp fork, because I think you can end up wallowing in it too much. At the same time I've learned the hard way that in pinning too many hopes on the future, you end up being disappointed and bitter and twisted. So I try to make whatever is happening today the focus of my energies.

Well I bought the very first Pink Floyd album, when it came out. I first heard about Pink Floyd, when I read about them in an underground magazine called ‘International Times’. At that time, the hippie ‘revolution’ hadn’t really happened, but was beginning to happen. There was a lot of things happening on the West coast of America, based around San Francisco and the psychedelic culture that was starting to emerge there. That was filtering into England, and bands like Pink Floyd were picking up on it. There was a club in London called the UFO club, reviews from this club were often published in the International Times. English people my age will probably remember this, but for anyone else, it wasn’t a newspaper in the traditional sense, it was a magazine in a newspaper format. It covered the alternative or counter culture. The thing that had grown from the beat generation, the fledgling psychedelic generation. They covered things like Alan Ginsberg’s famous poetry reading at the Albert Hall. I read about this band called Pink Floyd and it sounded very exciting.

I eventually got to hear the record and I saw them on TV, Syd Barrett was with them at that time, before he had his breakdown. I liked that incarnation of the Floyd more than any other, the first album is very prophetic, I think he was a vital ingredient for the Floyd’s thing at that time. Later Roger Waters became a stronger person, the music shifted slightly when Dave Gilmour came in, it mutated and grew and went different ways. But that first period I really liked, I actually went to see them play at Leeds Town Hall, in the later sixties, when they had this thing called an azimuth co-ordinator. Which was basically surround sound, they had speakers all around the hall, and the sound were moving all around, so it was quite technically impressive.

But what I remember the most about that particular gig, and I've still got the program for it upstairs. So if there are any Pink Floyd fans reading, that want to buy an original sixties Pink Floyd program, throw money! But what I remember about it was that I took my girlfriend at the time, whose name was Lynne. My parents were away at the coast, in their caravan. I said I wasn’t going to go with them because we wanted to see Pink Floyd, we had the tickets, we told her parents that my parents weren’t away, and that she was staying over at our house that night, basically so we could stay there, just the two of us, and have frenzied adolescent sex together. It was very memorable on both counts!

Yeah, I believe he wanted to buy it at one time, but I've sold both of them since, but not to him. At the time he wanted to buy it, I didn’t want to sell it.