I went out to supper with Paul Bell last night � to the usual Indian restaurant. I asked him about the Cream. He said the first gig he had ever been to � at a local school � we think it must have been in 1965 somewhere in South London � was the Beano era Bluebreakers. And of course he was transfixed � thus evolved the White Unicorn. Paul said he saw the Cream six times before he got to Cambridge. He said that neither he nor Jon Cole (Gibson 335 � Denny/Armatrading collaborator, first RnR musical director of Footlights) were at all cool until they got their Cream-chops together at which point people did start to take notice. He said he got to the point where he knew how to spell �Mingus� � I said that that was the right name to spell properly

He couldn�t throw much light on the source of Andy Powell (producer first Kate Bush album and Frith energiser)� s interest in the New York School. Andy was cool (no surprises there) but his dad ran/own a chemist shop and so he was particularly known for matters other than the impact of the I-ching on compositional form.

Cathy is now back in England and has just joined the team of a celebrated composer-academic in Cambridge. He thought this boded well for any Isbin venture thereabouts.

We went back to the cave and we played Gilbert�s Lullabye and the first six tracks of P Wheeler�s Red Blues. He remembered as I do that we never played Blue Grey Uniform properly. But we thought that our reading of Ghosts � the bands signature song � had a different emotional trajectory to the one on the CD � but it is that kind of song.

I am just listening to some of the demos I knocked out maybe two years ago on some of Paul�s Seachanges material. Paul said just this week that when I produce his material the �red� on the �red-blues� scale goes towards anger rather than warmth.

I quite like this Seachanges material - especially the version of �Star� which I would modestly contend has one of my more Richard Thompson moments on the Dusosonic.

Maybe I ought to do a little EP called �The Seachanges demos � an early reading�. It�s a completely different soundscape � much more performance based.

I quite like the versions of London to Shanghai here � I forgotten there are two

one R Thompson based and the other with two flutes. I guess I must have done them on the Tascam cassette 4 track. Oh there�s a great song to about the 25-11-74 too � he�s not let that one out.. One of these versions did end up on Serious Music flowing into a funky jazz-Dhorn dialogue of the same tune � in fact here�s the backing track. OO now that�s a temptation � interesting that I made the groove by hand from the elements in MIDI. This is the finished track � the frequency range is OK � in fact I had been wondering taking digitally mixed tracks and recording them to cassette and then back to digital as part of the mastering process � to bed them down.

Paul Bell agreed that New Age Aquarian is just extraordinary by the way. Chris�s production skills are superb � no question about that.

Its amazing what you find rooting through old MDs � here�s a line on multisynth Dhorn that�s crying to be sent to Gilbert � better get it into a WAV asap.

Have I mentioned that I have been working on another Fifths piece. This one works with four flutes playing C/G looping through quite a long delay. A fifth flute creates harmonic variation � working out towards the metatonal zone � and the Dhorn does a dialogue. All this has evolved on Minidisc � I think it might be time to take it into the digital era.

I had a good meeting with Lucy at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce this afternoon - fascinating to find out how the frontline of selling training to small engineering businesses has been going.