sporadic writings from Eric Goulden / Wreckless Eric
I have an online interview to do for a Swedish magazine. The first question is: how has 2025 been for you? I still haven’t done the interview. I wrote this instead which probably isn’t what they’re looking for: We moved back to the UK from upstate New York in the summer of 2024 and, apart from a lot of touring to promote Amy’s album Hang In There With Me we seemed to spend the rest of that year…
I don’t like the vertical format. I don’t enjoy Instagram since they dropped the square format and went vertical. The squares were reassuring somehow, clunky and slightly ridiculous. I could have gone on forever, putting fragments of my life into squares. Life is a business of constant adjustment. If you can’t adjust you won’t survive. But of course you won’t - no one makes it out alive, which is…
We were in Hebden Bridge the other weekend, about to play in the Trades Club. I first played there in 1986 with the Len Bright Combo - we played there twice that year in fact - once, I remember, in high summer - we camped afterwards in a Hebden Bridge adjacent field. The concert was extremely loud. I remember the night sky twinkling with a thousand silver stars, and a silence so deafening I can…
As we rolled on down the road towards Suffolk, Amy wondered why an open top car is cool, whereas driving a car with all the windows down marks you out as a loser. Could be the broken air conditioning. It’s on the endless list of stuff I’ve been meaning to get around to.I often feel like my life is an obstacle course of stuff that needs doing. We were rolling towards Suffolk because the Latitude…
I grew some purple sprouting brocolli. I’ve never grown anything you could eat, apart from a pot of supermarket basil once that sat on the window sill and yielded a rather dismal second crop. Other people do this stuff all the time but growing vegetables is new to me. There was a fifteen by ten foot patch of weeds with a rotting wooden border, and there was a greenhouse. The dour Protestant in me…
I was worried. I spent most of the previous day getting ready and feeling vaguely resentful because I’ve got better things to do with my life than take on the US immigration authorities only to wind up shackled and in a detention centre waiting to be deported from a country I was none too fussed about coming to in the first place. I didn’t sleep well - spent half the night on the sofa reading Mike…
I was driving to Birmingham - that’s Birmingham in the middle of England, not in Alabama. I stopped for a rest, got some bad coffee, clicked up Facebook on my phone. A post from Lindsay Hutton: RIP Scott Cornish . My first thought was that this was not possible, but that was wrong, because with Scott anything was possible. I was swept up in a jumble of thoughts and emotions. One clear thought…
Apparently it’s a milestone. Or should that be a millstone? I can’t remember which because I’m seventy so my brain doesn’t work. My brain didn’t work before, but then it was down to crazy living. Now it’s down to living long enough to be crazy. It’s expected. Soon I’ll be pissing in my trousers and there’ll have a gentle word with me about my driving, and I’ll give the car away to a distant neice…
A house can take it out of you. When we got it, almost thirteen years ago, it was in a horrible state - a foreclosure, abandoned by the previous owners who apparently fled to South Carolina leaving behind debts and mountains of junk. We never knew how many of them there were - it’s a slow process of casual detective work. We've been able to tell a lot from the mail that still sometimes arrives for…
I would have said architrave but no one seems to know the word, so I’ll just say door trim instead. The point is, when I fit a new door trim or architrave should I take off the difficult-to-completely-remove label with the barcode on it? Or will the future owner of this house be disappointed when they tear off what they thought was a period feature only to find a chain DIY store bar code on the…
In the end there was nothing scary about cataract surgery but it was a big inconvenience. I put it off for years - never had time, I always had a record to make or a tour to do. Eventually I capitulated, booked myself in for the 21st December at an eye clinic in Albany. They do one eye at a time with a few days in between. In my case a few days turned into two weeks because Christmas and the New…
The rain stopped as I arrived in Manchester. I was an hour late because I’d underestimated the traffic. The load in at Gulliver’s is a nightmare - block a narrow one-way street while you get everything out of the car and through the door into a passageway leading to the toilets and the flight of stairs up to the venue. There’s usually no one to help you. You can’t leave everything cluttering up a…
I remember feeling overwhelmed. The Prince Albert in Brighton was fuller than I’d ever seen it, even for other artists who aren’t me. I’m more used to a respectable forty-two people (or less). Then London. The Lexington. Again, sold out. Robert Rotifer opened for me. Acoustic guitar, snappy thirty-five minute set. He went down alarmingly well and came back into the band room glowing - ‘I LOVE your…
Hastings seems like an age ago. It was bright, it was sunny, I felt warm, and even slightly fuzzy. Onstage I didn’t know quite what I was doing - I was still learning the new songs. Amy was with me. It was Autumn, warm on the south coast. We drove down early and checked into Shopfitters Paradise which is what I call the eccentric Premier Inn down there next to Sainsbury’s. Tonight's venue, the…
As I drive along all kinds of things run through my mind. I often find myself asking is this gruelling? People keep telling me it is - that’s a gruelling tour schedule you have there they’ll say, and I’ll do my best to look wan and heroic, all the time thinking that no, it really isn’t any more gruelling than anyone else’s job. Everyday life is gruelling - getting up at some hideously early hour,…
I used to have it down, hardly had to think about it, I knew exactly what time to set off to get to places on time, almost by instinct, but it’s been four years since I toured here in the UK and I’m out of practice. Now I have to think about it. Salford - BBC 6 Music - work backwards from the requested arrival time. Look at the GPS journey time, add an hour - no, two hours - traffic delays,…
I’ve always thought of myself as the kind of artist who would never appear on Later With Jools Holland . Over the years I’ve turned this into a great comfort to myself: imagine the stress of it - the compromises, the trying to not look like complete shit, the crash diet because everyone knows that television adds twenty pounds to your weight, the other bands all sniggering at my incompetence and…
I think we were on a high security alert. It seems highly likely at JFK on the day a former US president gets arrested on criminal charges. It’s the first time this has happened in the history of this - I was going to say Great but my British sarcasm might be lost on a few so I’ll amend that to Mediocre - country of ours. Not that it’s my country, I’m just a Green Card holder. I really don’t even…
I’m very sad for the passing of Wilko Johnson. I flew to England and got the news when I arrived. I’m glad to be in England at the moment, it seems appropriate - Wilko may have been playing American music but he remains an absolutely English phenomenon. As soon as I heard Doctor Feelgood I was a fan. I bought their first album as soon as it came out in 1975. Down By The Jetty was not like other…
I have a gig this coming weekend playing with my wife, Amy Rigby. I’m principally the bass player in her band though I also play guitar on a couple of tunes and an electronic instrument called an Omnichord which has been rechristened by Amy as the Omacron . I also sing harmony or back-up vocals. I was thinking about the difference between preparing for one of Amy’s shows and one of my own.…
I used to take it all in my stride but getting ready to go and do shows was always a quietly fraught business for me. Sporadic shows are the worst because during the time at home the equipment gets disassembled for recording purposes, guitar cases end up in corners of the basement, batteries go flat and I lose track of which lead gets used for what. It’s important to have a system - people might…
When the brakes failed at seventy miles an hour in rush hour on the M25 I didn’t panic, I calmly said the word ' no ' as if in response to an incorrectly answered question. I used the gears to slow the car down and worked my way over to the inside lane, and then to the hard shoulder. I almost made it to a standstill but I ran out of road where the hard shoulder gave way to an exit. I had no choice…
I had a run-in with a gun person who attempted to explain to me how it all works: Someone points a gun at you, he’s the bad guy, I’m pointing a gun at him, I’m the good guy - see how it works? I didn’t see how it worked then and I still don’t. I offended him deeply when I suggested that if he shot someone in a scenario such as this, then far from being the big hero he’d probably shit his pants. He…
I keep writing stuff and not posting any of it - the world lurches from crisis to crisis and what I write quickly becomes irrelevant, inappropriate at at the very least just plain glib. I won’t write stuff about what’s wrong with the human race, and tell everyone how to put the planet to rights because it’s really not my place to do so, and most of the people who read what I occasionally write…
The Monkees TV show was first shown in England in September 1966. I was twelve at the time so it was ok to like it. I was instantly a fan. I liked the clothes they wore, I liked how Peter Tork held a bass guitar, loved the big tambourine wielded by Davy, the English Monkee who came from Manchester like my family did, and had the added attraction of not being very tall just like me. They were a…