Spent the best part of last Saturday round at Yosound studio recording with John Makin. Yosound is owned and run by our co-conspirator "Yoyo" Yovanofski who will be familiar to the cognoscenti for his excellent work on Zen Blues. Creeping into his cosy converted remise and closing the heavy soundproof door on the demands and distractions of the outside world is a reassuring back-to-the-womb experience. By playing "live", with no overdubs, we managed to get down eight tracks in five hours, which is pretty good going by any standards. Despite the odd little glitsch, we're very pleased with what will be a first-rate demo for our Country Blues act - John on guitar and vocals and myself on harmonica and harmonies.
Titles include:
"Jesus on the Main Line " (Traditional, arranged John Makin)
"Corn Bread, Peas, Black Molasses" ( Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee)
"Come on in my Kitchen" ( Robert Johnson)
John's got a gig lined up for us in May, so watch this space!

Finished reading "The Climate of Treason" by Andrew Boyle. Subtitled "Five who Spied for Russia", it's a thing I picked up in a second-hand bookshop in York last month, when I was going through my Philby craze. What is the rather obsessive fascination with all this spy stuff? Obviously the class aspect is irresistible in that slightly prurient English way, but I think the whole issue of deception is a very important factor too. Our lives are full of deceptions, both of ourselves and of others. While seeking to present a more or less homogeneous image to the outside world, we are aware, consciously or even unconsciously, of all sorts of inner contradictions and ambivalent motives within ourselves. In other words, the persona we seek to project on the outside world is a sort of convenient fake and we cannot help but be impressed by those who are able to "fake it" to such an extravagant degree.
Boyle is particularly good on the Zeitgeist of the thirties which caused ordinarily left-leaning Cambridge undergraduates to go "all the way" and become fully paid-up Stalinists. The senseless and appalling slaughter of the "War to end all Wars" and the utter incapacity of the capitalist system to offer any sort of valid response to the Great Depression suggested to some that there was a need to sweep away the whole of the old rotten structure and start again afresh.
More personal, psychological motives are also revealed. Burgess seems to have had a pathological need to nurture a posy sense of one-upmanship. Maclean was in search of a secular pseudo-religion to replace the abandoned Calvinism of his boyhood. Philby wished to emulate his swashbuckling Lawrence of Arabia figure of a father in deeds of anti-establishment derring-do.
Why did they keep at it so long? Fear of the consequences of being revealed? But the fourth man (Blunt as we now know) was able to cut a deal with the authorities. Boyle astutely suggests a case of a sort of arrested development, whereby they were never able to shake off the mind-set of their youth. I find that argument rather convincing. I still carry within me attitudes and assumptions which retain a strong flavour of those critical formative years of sixth-form and University (1967-1974), which probably influence my interpretation of the world about me far more than I realise myself. Funnily enough, I recently stumbled across a quotation from Ibsen, who makes the very same point, but in a still more categorical way: "There are truths which have attained such an age that they have really outlived themselves. and when a truth becomes as old as this it is on the best way to become a lie..."