Rainbow bridge to the clouds...

Playlist
David Reilly – Anthology
Asia - Phoenix
James - Hey Ma
Black Mountain - In the Future
Udo Lindenberg - Stark wie zwei
Sparks - Exotic Creatures of the Deep
Coldplay - Viva La Vida
Uriah Heep - Wake the Sleeper
The Violet Archers - Sunshine at Night
Alice Cooper - Along Came a Spider
No-Man - Schoolyard Ghosts
UNKLE - End Titles...Stories For Film
Cloudland Canyon - Lie in Light
Glasvegas - Glasvegas
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Neal Morse - Lifeline
The Bad Plus - For All I Care
Girls Aloud - Out of Control
Crazy Wisdom - We Live the Foreigner's Life

So there I was tonight, compiling a CD of my “best tracks of 2008” after a fairly uneventful day...

I’d watched the first half of “Coronation St” then retired upstairs and played through ten songs on the old guitar...

Whilst surfing the net and reading through my blog links, making a few comments of no great depth or importance on a couple, I’d been galvanised into compiling the new disc I was making, by Impossible Songs’ own take on the best of the year so far...

The phone rang, pretty late...

It was my old musical cohort Mr Malcolm Logan, with whom I’ve served in many bands over the years, having known him since he was just a boy back in 1981...

I’ve not spoken to Malcolm for a couple of years, since he came along to a CBQ performance in September 2006 but, funnily enough, as I walked past Haymarket Station tonight, he’d popped into my head and I’d been thinking back to that night and all the music we’d made together....

Sadly, Malcolm was calling to tell me of the death of our old friend Charlie Dootson...

Of course that will mean nothing to you but Charlie was the guitarist in our group Crazy Wisdom for almost five years, till the band drifted apart following the closure of Reptile Records, which had provided our writing and rehearsal space...

He was an amazing guitarist – Count Brodski (also a Crazy Wisdom member) advised, when I called him to pass on this awful news, that he’d always wondered what a musician of such quality was doing playing in a band with us...

Ironically, Charlie had been my replacement in Malcolm and my’s earlier group, Call Me Clive, when Mr Logan and the other three members decided to fire me...

A few years later the hatchet was buried and Malcolm and I recorded an EP under the name Crazy Wisdom...

When Malcolm brought in Charlie and I brought in Brodski, Charlie brought a musicality to the group and turned us into a real rock band...

He even got us signed to an obscure American record label...

Charlie and I enjoyed working together in Crazy Wisdom and, of course, we both had very different memories of our non-overlapping Call Me Clive days – but he often said how much he’d enjoyed playing my music with the band...

We wrote over fifty songs together as a group but we took over three years to record our only album, “We Live the Foreigner’s Life”, released in the summer of 1998 by which time, we’d kind of run our course...

I’d shut the shop, Malcolm was going off to Holland to live and, while nothing was ever agreed about the future and, indeed Malcolm went to Holland with some new Crazy Wisdom demos in his case, recorded without Charlie though, we had, to all intents and purposes, split up (of course we never admitted that to each other always thinking we’d reconvene at some point)...

In the last ten years, I’ve probably only seen Charlie a couple of times (and for that matter Malcolm too) after spending so much time together in the band, rehearsing and writing and recording every week for a period of years...

By the time we finished, we’d written some excellent songs together and, while we ended up returning to our electronica routes for much of our album, truth be told, the period I enjoyed best was when we were rocking out in the band’s mid period – some of the most exciting tracks I’ve ever played on...

This golden era is covered in the 69 track 4CD set I put together in 2002 – now deleted but perhaps requiring a remaster and release in Charlie’s honour...

And so a sad reunion with my chums from Call Me Clive and Crazy Wisdom is in the diary for next Friday...

Here’s a short track from the Crazy Wisdom album – it’s a solo piece by Charlie that he’d often break into during lulls in our rehearsals....

It's available via the link to download my music for free...

CHARLIE DOOTSON - RAINBOW BRIDGE TO THE CLOUDS



Lowlight of the Day : All too early death of an old sparring partner...