heartofdavid, thank you. You're a star. I'd missed that post.
Ah, musical stave indeed. Good call, blemished. Possessing no discernible innate musical creativity, that obvious musical imagery did not even dawn on me. Duh. I'll go re-watch the Sound of Music to re-acquaint myself with the basic concepts.
Doh a deer, well that explains the Manafon cover...
Those 125 spheres, however? Spheres of influence? Spherical patterns on the floor? I'll let it go. Ruminating upon its possible interpretation serves me well as a good sheep counting replacement to assist nodding off.
Back to the script, the Five Lines snippet certainly seems to indicate the promise of another strong vocal performance. I do very strongly feel David's voice is growing stronger with age. Mature and confident maybe? Or perhaps my ears have grown old with it. I find it immensely satisfying to a degree I can’t recall it affecting me back in his Virgin days. I've read dissenting opinions but, at the risk of sounding sycophantic and a tad pretentious – never! - to my ears its almost an instrument in itself that's time seasoning like an grand violin. I love the vocal tone, pitch and timbre on Manafon – even though it did often seem to dominate the instrumentation sometimes. Five Lines looks like a small evolutionary step on from there but on the available evidence Ithink the strings are holding their own.
Blimey, all this excitement just for one new piece. I'd love to possess official studio recordings of Bhajan, David's Praise vocal and Blue-skinned Gods. Great Live versions do exist, of course. It feels there's a volume of work we've tasted but never officially savoured and are now unlikely to know them in any other format. Were it not for the bootlegs, they would almost be entire strangers. I suppose for pre Blemish era material, David let's it go as historical works representing where he was and adding nothing to where he will go? However, where does Jacqueline fit in? David teased us with the promise of a final studio polished version. I loved its rather Nick Drake or Tim Harding feel and thought that was possibly an interesting next direction as radically tangential to Manafon as Snow Borne Sorrow was to Blemish.
Maybe Jacqueline will appear in some project sometime. Perhaps someone with David's address could drop him Five Lines or so to enquire.
And on that terrible finish – and having successfully analysed a 30 second snippet almost to death - I exit the competition having failed to qualify from the group stages. Typical Scot.
Eddie