20.9.05

I was a miner


I once met Billy Bragg at a signing in Selectadisc. He was very genial as I remember, and he was concerned that because he only had a black felt tip pen, his signature on the black sleeve of the Days Like These EP I had just bought would be pratically invisible. You can just about see it, if you angle the record to the light and squint.

The only other signed record I own is Something Else by The Kinks. Ray Davies did a book signing at Virgin when I was in charge of the book dept, and he cheerfully agreed to sign Kinks paraphernalia as well as his autobiography. Apparently he was suffering from a particularly bad ear infection at the time, and this formed the basis of my one and only conversation with a song writing legend:

Me: 'How's the ear Ray?'
Ray: 'Not too bad thanks.'

1 comment:

Tom said...

I also met Richard Thompson, at an instore performance at Virgin. He clearly hated it, and when a bloke offered to shake his hand after playing 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, Thompson looked at his hand as though it was a dead fish and said 'Get back to the office'.

My claim to fame - showing him the way to the gents...