I drew a lot of trees last month. It started out when I decided to draw the big tree outside Rock Hall, followed by a big tree outside Physics on that same lunchtime, and just went from there, filling my sketchbook pages with trees over the following couple of weeks. We lost a lot of trees in Davis the past few years, mostly during the big storms at the start of 2023. I miss their shade, especially on the very hot days, and this hot summer is lasting right into Fall as we are currently in a first week of October with multiple days over 100 degrees. A tree is a good place to stop and think for a while. Trees are alive, very much alive, and to sit in its shade makes you feel like you are protected by a large giant. I’ve not been much of a tree climber; when I was a kid I would climb trees because I was light as a feather, but never too far up, because I wouldn’t float down like a feather.

I don’t really have a lot to say about the trees themselves. I could be all naturalist and tell you all what type of tree they are after drawing, but I didn’t bother checking; many of them are types of Californian Oak, but don’t quote me on that. I should know better. When I was 11, I won a competition which was held in schools across the London Borough of Barnet, when I designed a ceramic butterfly. I was really interested in pottery when I was at junior school, and thought it might be something I carried on doing as an art form into later life, but in my first ceramics class at secondary school I got the impression that the teacher, Mr Herring, hated me for some reason. I got the impression he hated a lot of people, but he gave me a discredit on day one when, after he had thrown a huge lump of clay at a pupil, I told him my old pottery teacher told us never to throw clay. He also told me my drawings were really bad. I got a second discredit for not doing my homework once – the homework was literally drawing, but he’d made me feel like I couldn’t draw – and that resulted in me getting my one and only detention at school. In all the time taking those classes I don’t remember making one actual thing. But before Mr. Herring’s class put me off doing ceramics for life, I had won a prize at primary school for my ceramic butterfly. In fact, they told me the main reason I had won is because of all the preparation drawings I had done, they liked them so much. My prize was a book called ‘The Young Naturalist’, and it was all about looking out for insects and identifying plants, it was stuff I was always quite interested in when I would go camping with the cubs and scouts. However, I could not really read it much at home, because my older brother and sister took all levels of piss out of me telling me that a ‘Naturalist’ was one of them people that goes around the woods in the nude with other nudey people, and that I must be one of them if I had that book. Now even though I knew full well that they meant ‘Naturist’, and I knew the difference between the words, I could not be completely certain, they might have been telling the truth. Either way, I thought it best to hide that book, in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought that I, a freckly red-headed 11 year old kid, might be secretly spending my weekends dancing about woodlands in the nip. To this day, I try to avoid using the word ‘Naturalist’, and have even so far resisted getting my US citizenship because I’m a bit worried about the ‘naturalization process’, nobody is making me take my trousers off and go dilly-dallying about an orchard. So that’s the reason I can’t really tell one tree from another.

Being around the trees does make me think though. A little thinking can get you into a lot of trouble, a wise man once said (it might have been Brick Top in Snatch), but this is a place for my thoughts. One piece of music was going through my head when I drew these trees, the song ‘Trees’ by Pulp. It was on their final album in 2001, ‘We Love Life’, an album I very much adored, and brings me back to those first few months in Aix-en-Provence, listening to that CD in my shared apartment above the bakery. Pulp have been very much in my head recently, because after 30 years of being a fan, last month I finally got to see them live in concert. It was an amazing experience, my mind going right back to the 90s. They played at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, a pretty decent sized venue. My wife and I travelled down from Davis, I bought the t-shirt, we sat pretty high up. The opening band were not great, a duo playing very odd experimental (self-indulgent) music, the classic avant-garde-a-clue. Pulp on the other hand were amazing. The bass player Steve Mackey died last year so this your is a tribute to him. They reformed in 2023 for a series of gigs, and these ones over here in the US were their first gigs over this way in many years. Jarvis was great. I was a massive fan of Pulp in the mid-90s, ever since I saw one of their video for ‘Lipgloss’ on the ITV Chart Show in late 1993 (I used to watch that show on Friday nights when I was 17, that and The Word; I didn’t have a social life then, just like now). I loved His’n’Hers, Different Class blew me away. They played loads of favourites, ‘Babies’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time’, ‘Disco 2000’ (which reminded me so much of those sweaty nights at indie clubs in Soho in 1995-96) and of course ‘Common People’ which is still one of the great pop songs of all time. Their 1998 album This Is Hardcore is another album I adore; the title track is an absolute classic and I was so pleased they played that one live, but they didn’t play ‘Help The Aged’ (which we rewrote as a football song in 1998 called ‘Help The English’ and those are the lyrics still in my head). They played some songs from We Love Life too, but unfortunately not ‘Trees’. And yet, that is the song that has been in my head the most this month, as you can see.

Each of these interludes between trees is going to be a little story or thought all of itself. That’s ok. This will be a long post. There will be eight trees. And there will be more in the next post, about nine. The great thing is, you don’t have to read the words, you can just look at the pictures. The words are here to break up all the pictures really. I drew these trees around UC Davis and downtown Davis, some with the fountain pen like the one above, the rest with the uni-ball signo pen like the one below. I listen to podcasts a lot when I sketch, and since the Pulp show I have been gorging myself on podcasts featuring interviews with Jarvis Cocker. There’s something about his dry, gentle Sheffield voice that is so reassuring. I listened to the audiobook of his 2022 book ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’, which he read himself. It’s a book about the stuff in his attic, and how talking about the stuff (and deciding whether to keep it or chuck it) becomes in a way the story of his life. I feel that way about my drawings, and this blog, I guess. I could go through the random things in my own house, or those things from my childhood still somewhere in my mum’s loft, and draw them, picking apart the story of my own existence. Self-reflection, or escaping the present into the fog of nostalgia? It’s best to be careful about these things. In that interview I did recently on KDRT it was remarked that my posts are a kind of life story (this one is, that’s for sure), and I think that’s part of the excuse to draw, is the excuse to look back while looking at the world in front of me. The tree above is right outside a funeral home, and I kept thinking that I should do all my thinking while I am alive, because (to paraphrase Paul Weller) there’s no thinking after you’re dead. Wow, that got dark! Best get back to listening to some Pulp, that will cheer us up.

Speaking of 90s music, one of my other favourite bands Oasis have finally announced a truce and will play a number of big shows next year, you may have heard. Of course I was very excited to hear the news, but had mixed emotions about it. The shows of course have had insane levels of interest, and the whole fiasco about dynamic pricing – you wait online in a queue for seven hours for expensive tickets to a show in a massive packed stadium where they will probably sound a bit shit, and if you are lucky enough to actually get through, you find the cost of the tickets has doubled or tripled? And you are on the spot. I didn’t even try. It was overall a very bad look, left a sour taste. Like Pulp, I was obsessed with Oasis in the mid-90s but never saw them play live, it was too hard to get tickets. I considered Knebworth in 96, but that would have meant hanging on the phone all day, and besides I had to work on the Saturday at ASDA. One of my co-workers did go, I think I even covered for her on the Sunday, and she had an amazing time (while I made tea and toasted teacakes for shoppers). I didn’t mind. I had already seen the Sex Pistols that summer at Finsbury Park, and nothing in the world was topping that. I never had the patience for competing for tickets to the big gigs, though looking back Knebworth would have been fun. I did eventually get tickets to see Oasis in France in 2000, when I was living in Belgium. It was I think in Metz, and I didn’t really know how I was going to get there and back from Charleroi, so when the band had a big fight in Spain and Noel Gallagher quit, they cancelled those shows and I was partly relieved. When they split in 2009 I thought it was a long time overdue; there are a few songs on the last few albums I really enjoy but nothing like the energy of the 90s. For the past fifteen years, I have loved Noel’s ‘solo’ albums, and even those Beady Eye albums made by Liam and the remainder of the band. Most of all I’ve enjoyed the interviews, and the silly drama of it. The music is part of my own personal history, it’s not for everyone but there were big reasons that it hooked onto me when I was 18-19. When the announcement came they were finally getting back, well it wasn’t like when Pulp re-formed and people were like, oh ok. With Oasis the whole world all seemed to have an opinion. People delighted in telling the world they hated them. Well, I loved them. Part of me wanted them to never get back, because it was over and done with, but well, playing some live shows with all the old stuff is all part of the fun. The Sex Pistols did it, after all, and they still hate each other thirty years after that. I’m mostly looking forward to the interviews, to see what the pair of them will be like together again after all this time (and when they will split up again).

Music has been on my mind lately. I got that record player, and belted out the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘Substitute’, the first song I ever learned on the guitar. My uncle Billy played that song to me on the same vinyl record back in about 1988 or 89 and I was transfixed with the sound. You could play like that, simple angry chords, and it was great. You didn’t even have to get it right. I learned the chords from ear, got the words all wrong, played it fast like the Pistols and slower like the Who (marginally slower), and to this day I still get it wrong but it doesn’t matter, my version is right because it’s my version. I have loved playing the guitar since then. I got an acoustic guitar at a car boot sale for about a fiver, a fairly crappy old thing but it played and stayed in tune, and I learned all my chords on that. At school I would play the basic nylon string guitar in the music room, I always got a tune out of it but it was quiet, it was hardly right for playing Anarchy in the UK.  I started writing songs almost right away. One of the first I wrote was called ‘Strike’, written as a homework assignment in Music where we had to write a song about something in the news. Me and my friend Kevin performed it in class, me on the guitar and him on either the keyboard or tambourine, I forget now. The chords were some thing like G-E-D-C-G, with no melody, and the opening words went something like “down to the station I usually hike, today I’ve got to take my bike, because there’s a strike.” That’s all I remember. I didn’t even have a bike. Still it was a start, and I started writing any old nonsense after that, looking for chords and tunes, some very catchy, some very crappy, latching onto whatever was floating about. At this point I loved the Pogues, the Pistols, the Beatles, the Jam, the Who, and loads of Irish folk and rebel music, I had this song book with guitar chords that we picked up at one of the Irish music festivals. I got my first electric guitar on my 14th birthday (thanks to my big brother), a trusty Westone Concord, though I didn’t have an amplifier so never plugged it in until I was in front of an audience at school. I wrote and performed a lot of songs at school, I had that band called ‘Gonads’ with my mate Hooker singing (a much better singer than I ever was) and we would get booed off annually at the Christmas Variety Show, which we loved. Funny enough I remember first hearing Oasis after leaving school and thinking, wait this is the sound I was after, I could never get it but this is what I was going for. I had given up the idea of being in a band by then. I did keep writing songs for years, in waves, and I think a part of me would write them with my old mate’s voice in mind, and they were never for playing or showing anybody, and eventually I stopped, seemed a bit self-indulgent. I do still find myself coming up with tunes though, playing them into my phone as 20-30 second unfinished sketches, and there they stay. I like to think that informs my sketching somehow, inspires me to draw more quick and less ‘finished’ sketches, but come on now.

This collection of trees is a bit like an LP isn’t it, with a Side One and a Side Two. A lot of these ones were drawn downtown while walking about on a Saturday afternoon, before heading to Armadillo Records to look through some vinyl. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989. I stood outside Froggy’s on 2nd Street to draw this one above, I was attracted to the reddish orange hue the tree took on at head height. Reminded me of myself, maybe? My hair is fading now though. The leaves haven’t fallen, but the bark is getting – wait, stop turning everything into some sort of tree tie-in. So, in this post I’ve covered even more mawkish autobiography than usual, from triumphs/failures in ceramics as a kid, finally going to see Pulp, failing to see Oasis, learning to write songs as a teenager, to now when my hair is fading and I’m obsessively drawing trees. In that radio interview recently Bill Buchanan described me as restless, and he was right, I’ve always been like that. Now I have started drawing trees, I can’t stop seeing trees to draw, especially those parts where all the big limbs start sprouting off from the main trunk. I wonder if the tree knows beforehand how many big branches will sprout out, which ones will be the main branches, which ones will get cut by some arborist or some force of nature, and just how far will some of those branches go? It’s all starting to feel like another autobiographical analogy again, and we’re not having that. Trees are just trees and I’m glad for them. They keep us cool and provide us with the air we breathe, and yes they can occasionally fall and ruin carports and rooftops, but that’s nature’s way isn’t it. Side One finishes with a tree and a bench in central Park, Davis, and that’s where we leave it. The bench is green in real life, if you’re interested. I could have left it out, but it seemed important to include.