‘Woan yu pleas tel me how menne Chaynjis thayr ar? The Little Man sed, As menne as reqwyrd. Eusa sed, Reqwyrd by wut? The Little Man sed, Reqwyrd by the idear uv yu. Eusa sed, Wut is the idear uv me? The Little Man sed, That we doan no til yuv gon thru aul yur changes’

- Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

Today I saw someone walking their dog backwards at the beach. The dog was heading south, frontpawforwardwise as normal, but the owner was facing back towards Pebble and I as they receded into the glare and squirelling sand snakes. And it wasn’t some momentary about face so as to catch a break from the sun and wind - it seemed they were in for the long bassackwards haul. Had the dog also been taking a ‘reverse constitutional’, as the mathematician Richard Sol inventively describes John Nash’s awkward stalking of pigeons on the lawn at Princeton - ‘I am trying to extract an algorithm to explain their movement’ - in the film A Beautiful Mind, I might have been genuinely concerned that someone had hit the rewind button; that this was as far as things were going to play out for me in the current direction, and pretty soon it would be time to take Pebble back to the pet shop (Pebble is also very interested in the birds at the beach, but she doesn’t want to extract an algorithm from them: she wants to extract their feathers, and their bones and their blood). And then all the rest: getting better at things, happier each day, nicer to people…But it is in the specifics that the reverse life really gets by turns mirthful and appalling (the supermarket and, horrendously, the bathroom), and no one has done this better than Amis in Time's Arrow, so I won’t even attempt here to illustrate the point - except to express my gratitude to all the recording engineers that have paid ME, generously and up-front, to pull from release and gradually dismantle in their state of the art studios all the various songs that have pestered and demanded life from me over the years, finally returning me to a state of unspecified yearning and, ultimately, to a glazed indifference. Yes, in the backwards universe Taylor Swift has to give all those millions back, whereas we lucky few actually get paid handsomely to just…stop. What is fascinating is that it is not just the causality but the morality of actions which is reversed; the patient saved by the kindly men in white coats extracting a syringe full of a lethal dose. Amis stole the technique from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where aircrews bravely suck entire firestorms from German cities into the holds of their planes, ferrying bombs back to American factories to be safely dismantled.

None of these flights of fancy would be possible without the wheel, which is clearly responsible for many good and many bad things, from the train approaching the platform at Auschwitz to the ambulance racing death on your behalf to Cedar Sinai (or even a cab: ‘Oh, you are going to the hospital too?’, Death says. ‘Let’s split the fare…’). Even planes like a good wheel or two (and be very wary of any aspiring pilots who tell you they don’t want to learn how to land, just how to fly). Captain Sully belly-flopping his A320 in the Hudson worked out remarkably well, but would you want to have to do that every single time? Wheels tend to carry you towards the future, whatever or wherever that may be. But as a circle that can spin in either direction, they have also afforded us temporal perceptions unheard and unseen before the advent of the stuff you can wrap around a wheel: tape and film. So it is no wonder that Vonnegut’s first foray into life in reverse is couched in the context of war films played backwards. For Time’s Arrow, Amis takes it a step further and ditches any reference to the medium that inspired this unique way of rendering experience. George Harrison’s greatest contribution to music may well be the backwards guitar lines on Tomorrow Never Knows, which Don Draper is clearly not too fond of at the conclusion of the Mad Men episode, as he takes the record off. But no matter, because the show’s creator Matthew Weiner puts it straight back on for the duration of the end credits, and rightly so. As poor Eusa is advised in the wonderfully circular reasoning above, tomorrow never does know. But we will find out in due course. And in the meantime, we have unlimited scope to rewind and playback, much good may it do us.

I wanted to serialise this current writing project and post each installment as it was completed, however I was equally unconvinced that doing so was in any way a good idea. So I decided to compromise and publish each set of album ‘liner notes’, if you will, in a place where they would be completely ignored, and for this purpose my two bandcamp pages, one for Das Phaedrus and one for Charcoal Burners proved perfect. In this enterprise, I feel like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, discreetly dropping a trouser leg full of excavated rubble from my cell in the exercise yard each morning. Or, if we play it backwards, I am trying to fill this irritating hole in my wall (which I craftily keep hidden behind a succession of posters) and, when I finally succeed in doing so, maybe they will let me out of here. Seems a better option than going in front of the parole board. Actually, dad had a bit of a brush with the law back there. He lives down the other end of the beach Pebble and I frequent, on the south side of the estuary which divides the several kilometres of belched kelp and fetchable sticks, in what was the family beachhouse and is now his permanent compound (I think of the Kurtz compound, a playground for creative urges freed from the confines of the workaday world). I spent a good deal of time as a child on that beach, with the estuary blocking further explorations to the north. Now, I am living life at the other end of the beach; or, more pointedly, living the beach at the other end of my life. I always think of my and the hound’s daily destination as Dover; the cliffs are not white, in fact the area is called Blackhead, but if Lear was spending any time in Dunedin I am pretty sure this would be his spot. The dying king’s tilt towards the coast, while ostensibly motivated by seeking the protection of daughter Cordelia’s French army, seems more about pursuing the extremity and limits of the land itself, since every other extremity and limit has been tested and torn through. For as long as I can remember, Blackhead has been a quarry, and there are now a lot of roads somewhere and a big patch of sky where most of it used to be. Hang on a minute, I’ll just change the reel over and we’ll soon have those trucks backing up with their megatonnage of gravel, the crusher spitting out ever larger boulders, the restorative explosive charges putting her back as she was in my youth, good as new.

Self titled albums tend to grate with me, seeming something of a massive failure of the imagination. Imagine if Amis had opted to call his first novel not The Rachel Papers, but Martin Amis? Actually, that would have been fairly accurate. Charcoal Burners is the first of the six records made in the current era - it is highly unlikely that there will be any more - and is another perfect illustration of the process of reversal. The vision, following a prolific songwriting jag on return to my hometown, was to assemble a proper band comprised of my dearest, oldest friends and/or the best musicians the city could lay at my homecoming feet. Instead: enter the Acoustic Guitarist. To his credit, he was the only one game for the voyage up this particular Congo. As I understand it from my limited interactions with the rest of the musical ‘community’, one will often write on an acoustic guitar with the understanding that songs will be treated any number of ways when they are in fact performed or recorded or otherwise offered up for digestion by the world. I had been there and done that with this company of tunes and, trust me, a veritable zen arcadia of distortion, supersonic stickwork and arpeggiated basso profundity was all mapped out there on my mental canvas, just waiting for the personnel to heed the call. To borrow a line from Dark Winning’s ‘All My Mother’: ‘Your landscape loves the camera but I fear the human element is one you may regret’. The Acoustic Guitarist promptly stripped all the songs back to their naked newborn selves and, before I knew it, there we were: yodelling and strumming our little hearts out in the city’s smaller, less frequented venues to the kind of reception you might expect would be offered to such a modest and well worn proposition. (Incidentally, in a staff briefing the other morning the ‘enviro teacher’ started babbling about ‘acoustic bikes’ - I had no idea what she was talking about until I twigged that she was referring to bicycles that were not electric bicycles: as in, bikes. I may have idly asked myself, or inquired of a colleague, whether that was in fact an acoustic chair she was sitting in, and whether that was altogether sufficient). The Acoustic Guitarist and I parted company soon after this record - not as a result of any great acrimony, but merely because I suggested that I would like to make…another record. Apparently insufficient time had elapsed since the last record. All of my associates have, to a greater or lesser extent, taken issue with the prolific nature of the enterprise. Sometimes I imagine them as an accusatory panel of Regans and Gonerils, arguing down the number of pissed mates dad is allowed to bring with him on his fortnightly visits. Except they aren’t knights, they are songs: ‘I entreat you to bring but five and twenty: to no more will I give place or notice’ quoth the Acoustic Guitarist. ‘What need you five and twenty, ten or five?’ quoth the bassman. ‘What need one?’ quoth the drummer.

So the unwanted songs, poor children, went on to better things on Orders from the House and The Best Day You Could Imagine. Ironically, for a fairly subdued outing, Orders is performed entirely on a Gibson Explorer, a ridiculous Z shaped heavy metal beast and about as far from an acoustic bike as it is possible to get. As for The Best Day, dear Sally proved an able and amenable bassist and, with continuing issues adhering to the position of drummer, I ended up playing them myself and crediting them to Finn, who was the dog at the time, now sadly deceased.