It’s been a manic week, one my best friends, David Vallade, had the opening of his exhibition at Rat Records in Camberwell, South London and I spent the best part of Wednesday and Thursday helping him hang the work whilst trying not to rifle through the racks. The opening was a great success and loads of old friends showed up including PC, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix) Ollie Teeba and various old college mates. I also found out that the giant poster of Funki Porcini’s Fast Asleep cover that they have hanging behind the counter is the actual one from behind the decks in the film Shaun of the Dead – small world. The occasion was only slightly marred by the fact that one of my kids caught chicken pox earlier in the week so the whole family couldn’t be there, I was looking forward to taking the boys to their first record shop…

That was Thursday night, Friday I was off to Gdansk in Poland to play at the Graffest festival alongside Jamie Vex’d, Mike Slott, Bullion and others. The event was held in a decrepit shipyard where giant industrial cranes towered overhead like mechanical insects and half the buildings seemed to abandoned wrecks. Artists like Os Gemeos, Blu and Zedz were present, painting and displaying sculptures both inside and out. Blu had been and gone, apparently shooting 20 frames worth for a new film he’s working on, and by the time I arrived Zedz was already painting over his work whilst men welded a boats hull into place nearby.

A lot of the work was still very much in progress and I got to wander about the indoor exhibition space and see several pieces unfinished including a giant mock up Cadillac complete with artist asleep in the back seat.

If truth be told I was actually more in awe of the shipyard and took a great many snaps of various decaying exteriors and overhead pipes and scaffold work. There’s something quite beautiful about the elements reclaiming their place, paint blistering off old wooden doors, rusting metal and decaying tiles.

The outside wall of the place was also amazing, holding a good 20 to 30 pieces about the shipyard, all realised in giant stencil form, including the typography.

Saturday was a return to the UK for a gig in Reading and Mike Slott and I had to evacuate the airport cafe after I spotted a kid’s bag left under a table. Turns out it was an innocent mistake and the mum came rushing up to get it but not before armed police had waved everyone away. The Reading gig looked like it was going to be a bit duff as I had problems with the video signal coming out all green which we traced back to the adaptor I was using finally.

The beginning of the set was marred by the failure of my 3rd track to load, something I can only put down to the file being corrupt possibly because it loaded the night before and ever other track was fine. Pretty galling to hear your track run out into silence as an expectant crowd gathers to hear and watch the beginning of your set as you struggle to work out what the problem is. Thanks to the quick intervention of Scott, the promoter, who put on some fill in music while I rebooted I quickly found the problem and the rest of the set went without any trouble, in fact it went quite well considering I’d been told it was an electro indie crowd who didn’t dance to drum n bass.