Another canal. Maybe you can imagine how much Angus McKie's artwork for Rondò Veniziano's 1983 album "Venice In Peril" blew the mind of a young boy rifling
through records in WHSmith, although I didn't know it was called that back then, and having my mind blown by
album art was literally the only reason I rifled through records in
WHSmith in the eighties. Click to enlage if you like, but don't blame me if you never come back, and here's another.
I've just started watching Dennis Potter's Casanova: its scenes of an imprisoned writer suffering pornographic flashbacks and raging against his cellmates are very reminiscent of The Singing Detective, but its sumptious and creepy Venetian exteriors are giving me welcome flashbacks of my own, specifically to how powerful a role some idea of this city played in my childhood imagination. The mad cover art on a Rondò Veniziano record is probably what started it.
A decade after "Venice In Peril" was released I would have my first ever pizza (I was scared of cheese) and, as I've written before, I chose a Veniziana because for every one ordered Pizza Express would pay "a discretionary 25p" to the "Venice In Peril fund" and I still hadn't been. In the end Venice did not disappoint, but that discretionary 25p would never change in value over the next three decades of my ordering Venizianas. Then, last weekend, I went to the Pizza Express in Paddington basin and found out it was no longer on the menu. I asked why. Apparently Pizza Express no longer has the necesary sultanas. I blame Brexit. How are we going to pay for that spaceship now?
These are what I finally put up on my wall. I painted them when I was eighteen, probably influenced by Michael Foreman and Tove Jansson (hence the absence of a mouth) to illustrate a story that I'd found in an old school magazine written when I was seven, probably nfluenced by Spike Milligan and, I don't know, pinball machines? It's called "My Island":
My Island is very dusty
and now and then you see winged lions with gold glossy manes and wings made of silk.
They are very tame creatures. They are vagetarians.
