Marty's Substack

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:21:47 GMT

I opened The Archive door and was greeted with a whoosh of hot air. I thought I’d better go out and enjoy the return of summer from the square. So I picked up my book, my keys, and my sunglasses. I put my book on my head and my sunglasses in my bag, I locked the gate so I couldn’t get out and put on my indoor skis. Eventually, the trixters in my brain let me out, and I went to the square via the recycling (ten-second walk) and ordered the usual. I found a table outside, responded to some messages and pulled out my book only to be hit with the thin racket of the phones and the stench of the cigarette smoke, so I retired inside to fight with the heat, an easier adversary.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:09:35 GMT

I had a brilliant idea — don’t go to bed at all. There was a reason, not that I needed a reason to stay up all night. I usually do anyway but today it was different. Usually I might go to bed between 5 and 7, and most often somewhere in between. But this week I needed to go and have a blood test because next week is the scary annual doctor’s appointment. One of the problems is that you can only get the test before 11 AM, so I thought I’d check what time they were open at the lab and it was 7.30 AM, so i just stayed up a little longer and got there before they opened at 7.09 AM, and I was second in the queue. I was in and out by 7.45 AM and walking back up to the square for a croissant and cup of cereal drink (I didn’t want coffee because I was going straight to bed). It was strange walking in the streets at this time, all the people out who had gone to bed around midnight, all up and fresh beginning their day, mine ending, goodnight.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:26:41 GMT

Sunday night, I was putting records away in the main Archive room. I have a stereo in there so I can have music in the room that I am in, instead of listening to the stereo from the front room. So I put a record on, as you do. Halfway through the track, I looked across to see a flame and smoke coming from the amp. I quickly turned it off and disconnected everything, and it’s now sitting by the front door wondering what its fate may be. So today I went to the stereo shop and they lent me a temporary amp. I have some speakers for that room that need re-coning and at some point in the future they will find an amp that suits the speakers and the burning amp (that I bought in Sydney in 1982) might just be on its way to the stereo graveyard.

In the record store yesterday, a man in an Oasis shirt looked over at me and said, “Do I know you?” I explained to him that I was actually the reincarnation of Elvis, and he might have seen me hovering above the city on my comeback tour. I was introduced to Jim, and Jim saw through the lies and told me he had ex band and my records. Yay, he asked if they had my records in the shop, and he bought a copy of Nightjar that I autographed, and he signed up for the Substack subscription. Great to meet you, and thank you for the support. It’s very much appreciated.

Opposite the stereo shop is the second-hand furniture warehouse. I usually go in for a walk around to see if there’s some quirky item or a CD shelf. Today I found what looks like a kids’ coat rack, multi-coloured, which I thought would be great for hanging guitar leads. I bought it for 5 Euros. The tangle of leads in the studio is unavoidable, so any way that you can get them off the floor will always be good, if you can do it in colour then even better.

It was a beautiful day and I went and sat at the café in the square and read my book — Winter’s Tales (1942) by Isak Dinisen/Karen Blixen (1885-1962) . I’m really enjoying her writing, some beautiful descriptive paragraphs and breathtaking sentences. The other day, I was in a café with my friend Dan and at the table next to us was a young girl reading a book — I nearly fell off my chair.

I went back to The Archive after reading as it was getting near dinner time but I realised that the late café visit meant that I wasn’t hungry, so I spent a couple of hours filing records and as I was doing it I wondered if there was a quicker system. Some of the records I already have, some I don’t, some are not the same, even if they are the same record — different pressings, different labels, some are in better condition, some are worse. So it’s just time-consuming, but one day.

I had a chat with Blueburst Craig in Atlanta about the future, and we solved all the problems of the new model for making and distributing music to willing ears. I had a sesh with Jeff in Kent, Ohio where all the problems of the world were solved. I listened to the latest Space Summit mix and solved the problem of how to sell a million records with a tweak — easy.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:55:03 GMT

Monday seems to be ‘errand day’, starting with picking up the lottery winnings — today I won a little over 3 Euros and used the money to put a deposit down on a 1965 Aston Martin DB5. There was a queue in the shop today, people buying scratch cards — is it for fun or is it desperation? I always thought the lottery or ‘the pools’ as it used to be in the sixties and seventies, was just a bit of fun. Nobody is really expecting to win because the odds are so bad, or are they carrying vague hopes? It seems people spend ridiculous amounts of money on this these daze and have systems and multiple numbers to crack the code. The ‘football pools’ is apparently still active, maybe they also had mathematical formulas to win but I just remember it as a weekly habit for part for the masses. My parents had a pub in Derbyshire and in the corner was a fruit machine (seventies term), it was so old-fashioned by today’s standards. You had to get three lemons or oranges or cherries, or if you got two you could hold them and spin one drum again. If you got three racing cars (not very fruity), you were in the money, or actually tokens, because it paid you in tokens which you could spend at the bar as I remember, or change them for cash, that fact actually escapes me, but although I was 12, I remember one young blonde lady, a regular customer who was always on it and when she won it made this sound like a blocked sink as it spat out your winnings. But because she was always on it, like all gamblers, she just put it all back in the machine again.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:44:54 GMT

I had a relapse today. It didn’t last long, but I felt that feverish thing come over me again — or was it the tea? The problem is that it’s hard to do anything when you are under the weather except sit. You can watch something, maybe listen to something, but actually doing anything productive beyond stimulating your entertainment genes is tricky. I still had to cook and manage that, watch a football game, file away some records, listen to a mix, but the speed at which I’m doing things means that my to-do list will take 11 years to complete.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:24:17 GMT

I rode the loss of the tooth into the night and was completely surprised that I had no pain, no lingering aftermath. I could feel something had happened inside and I was eating carefully, souping it up, a hole in my gum, not the perfect situation, I knew I’d been through something but it seemed a lot better than I expected. I got to bed a little earlier and I had no bleeding so my pillow was relieved. I had my alarm set for the early Liverpool game but woke before the alarm around 11AM (11.00) and realised that I was aching in my body and had a fever. I asked the internet if this was anything to do with having a tooth pulled and it told me this:”Yes, a slight or low-grade fever can happen as a normal part of your body’s healing response in the first 24 to 48 hours after a tooth extraction.”

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 03:31:48 GMT

Let’s face it (literally). The hot news of the day is having a tooth wrenched out of your jaw by a man in a mask holding needles and a pair of pliers - it isn’t exactly what you’re after on a sunny afternoon. But then the tooth was causing trouble in my mouth, getting into slanging matches, causing fights, a poisonous relationship with the other teeth, my gums and my tongue. The dental police had to be called.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 03:37:28 GMT

I was out of the house before I got up and on my way down to a coffee shop full of Portuguese teenagers and scratchy music. Within minutes I had a late bagel and coffee breakfast in front of me. I was meeting Dan on his return from Scotland. He arrived with a highland cold, a clip of Jim Kerr’s hair, a slice of edible tartan and John Higgins’ ferrule. It was a quick-ish meet, as I had to be back to The Archive for a sesh but we talked about projects — the Hoover Dam, moon bases, the morality of robots programmed by lunatics — to be continued. We finally made it to the garden where the southern sun beamed down and the ambience of the plants quieted the din.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:55:38 GMT

I had a lovely visit today from Paula and Dave from Las Vegas and Kat and her husband Shawn from Ohio. Paula got in touch and wanted to book a date to come and see The Archive and today was the day — 4 PM (1600) perfect. Straight out of bed, ravaged a mango, put on Janne Schaffer’s Andra LP (1974) - Second album in Swedish - and there they were at the door. We actually spent some time talking at the door, we covered the universe as the day walked by. The lady next door walked past her own door and giggled at the thought of doing such a thing…she seemed quite embarrassed about it, I know how she feels.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 05:22:32 GMT

Woke up, undid the gate, checked out the new blue sky, waved at the ladies of the day, they waved back, said hello to the girl in the Colombian café, we talked about yesterday’s rain, waved at a familiar face in the café and walked down to the main street. I decided that I just wanted to get out in the sunshine and use my legs. Locals, tourists, buskers — I saw a bloke in a Motörhead T-shirt and I wondered if there was ever a busker who played Motörhead songs?

So I’ve become a jarhead, that is, I head in the direction of jars. In the main street (Santa Catarina) there’s a shop that sells all kinds of different jars at reasonable prices, so I can get two glass jars for 10 Euros, which makes my new world pantry happy - brown rice and quinoa hate being in plastic (although I don’t really have a pantry). I’ve been picking up a bit more Portuguese recently so I can kind of half speak to the lady in Spanish/Portuguese and English if I need it (she has some English). I’ve been learning a little more at the café on the square too, where this week they taught me how to say ‘the usual’ in Portuguese and Spanish, although two different staff members told me the same phrase differently, that’s the problem, there are so many ways to say the same thing, like any language. I suppose it didn’t help my memory that I was working through my Swedish book at my table — a head full of foreign words.

Back at The Archive, I had another go at filing and made some progress, slow, but still found some dupes and got some things put away. I also discovered that I don’t have the first two B52s albums which I must fix. I listened to Spy by Carly Simon, released in 1979. I think she’s quite underrated considering her middle of the road profile — I heard recently that she had Parkinson’s disease, terrible. The Archive has so many artists to reassess, once famous, never famous or completely forgotten, or even made no impact at all when they were active despite how good they were.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:17:57 GMT

Today Renato and Paolo, the stereo men (there’s two of them) were coming over, although I’m not sure who is on the left and who is on the right. They were bringing the re-coned speakers for these Acoustic Research speakers that I have. So they put them in and (drum roll) connected one of them to the stereo, nothing happened. So they tried the other speaker and the tweeter didn’t work. They just took the whole speaker pair back to the shop to investigate. As they were leaving, it was spitting rain, so they waited for it to stop, and they went left and I went right.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 04:51:01 GMT

I thought, what on Earth is going on with the dishwasher? Then I realised it was thunder, and the chill had turned into rain. I went to the front where I could see out of the windows, and I saw one of the ladies of the daze motorbikes, a red Ducati Monster, and it reminded me of my deep yellow Ducati Desmo 250 café racer — and the wet seat in the rain. The bike had been there all night, she doesn’t usually leave it there overnight, the same spot as usual. I hope she’s OK. Then, as I wrote this, I smelt fumes and there she was out the front wiping the seat with the bike idling. I knocked on the window, smiled and waved. I was glad to see she was OK.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 04:29:34 GMT

The rumble out the front and the rumble out the back suggests it might be Saturday night. The music spills out from the club at the entrance of the alley behind The Archive where the weed smell drifts in through the open summer windows. At the front, a steady flow of cars, despite the hour — Saturday nights seem to do something to people’s heads — working the week, it’s like the only 8 hours of unabashed freedom from waking to sleep, uninterrupted by boundaries. It’s a mixture of relief, need and madness.

The slight chill changes the atmosphere on the street — it’s not exactly cold in the true sense, it’s ‘colder’ than it was or should I say ‘not as warm’ but it’s still summer, it’s still Portugal and that means summer is longer, certainly longer than when I lived in Stockholm. I might be wearing a T-shirt here in January, whereas in Stockholm I would be seriously layered up and trying not to slip on the ice.

Outside in the street, the two friendly Nigerian/Spanish girls, best friends, giggling in the street together, looked like they were waiting for a car, their night was over despite other girls staying, and two groups of men standing around. It closes down at the front earlier than the back, the club stays open all night and that means the alley gets the weed traffic, but you can hear the chatter from people at the beginning of the alley — they don’t need to be lurking closer to my back windows to hear them.

The deck is closed because they are on holiday at the restaurant, but there’s still chatter outside the front door. The deck is made of wood, and men just stand there and lean against it, like it’s some kind of anchor. They are not always looking for girls, they might be from the rowdy Colombian restaurant next door. The deck usually closes before ten, the pizza place at eleven, but the Colombian bar at midnight, then the street slows down. Between one and two, the girls disappear, then it’s just strays coming through from the centre of town, sometimes looking for girls when they’ve all gone home and sometimes banging on my window while I explain to them (in Spanish) that they are too late — go away.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:13:16 GMT

Mega psychedelic shopping today, 100 Euros worth, I was thinking I must have expensive food tastes, buying fruit and posh vegan food (that isn’t posh at all) but apparently the masses have their meat - and it’s expensive too. On the way back, I walked past one of the ladies of the day, Lydia from the Dominican republic, she only speaks Spanish. We had a small discussion about how ‘caro’ everything is. Lydia is always so nice and there she is on the street every day, so that she can go to the psychedelic psupermarket too.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:46:35 GMT

Clouds, a breeze and a small relief from the hotter weather. No need for the fans today, although inside the cafe on the square it was as hot as the day before - I suppose the heartbeats of the machines keep on beating whatever is happening outside. The streets of August packed, the last hurrah for the kids before they return to the next school year in September and the retirees take the opportunity to go to a warm southern Europe that is both kidless and young parentless.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:10:15 GMT

MIGRAINE — I’m not sure if everyone quite understands what migraine is — even the doctors? For me, apart from the issue of diamonds in my eyes, only seeing half of things, and finally a dull headache (which are my symptoms these daze) although it isn’t ideal, it’s a walk in the park compared to the bad old days. People’s misunderstanding of migraines is probably because they have never experienced one, but some people call a bad headache or even just an uncomfortable headache a migraine, but migraine can be something much more severe — I know it put me in hospital as a teenager where it was so bad they thought it must be meningitis and gave me a lumbar puncture where they push a great big needle into the base of your spine and draw out a fluid that tests the diagnosis. Jeff Beck died of meningitis — luckily I didn’t have it, I just had extreme migraines — ‘just’. The specialist at the hospital told my parents that it was the worst he’d ever seen. In my bad daze, it would strike fear into me because I knew how terrible the pain was going to be, and how long I would be out and how I was going to get to safety from where I was when it hit. I thought about describing exactly what happens to your body, but it’s kind of unbelievable — it’s like when the hulk transforms and his first reaction is, Oh no, if you are a serious migraine sufferer, it’s the same, except it’s not just your skin that turns green, everything does. Touch is painful, the squeaky noise of a door handle hurts, light is unbearable and all this with a sledgehammer banging into your head whilst you are retching without anything to retch - five daze later, you’re recovering. Also there’s the numbness, in your mouth, your hands, the side of your face. There was one time I was at a concert and my arms locked and I couldn’t move them. Another time I was in a phone box and unable to dial a number for help because I couldn’t figure out how to do it - this is a symtom of aphasia where you can’t iterate words and are actually unable to articulate to a stranger what the problem is. So, when people say they have a migraine, it can be what it has become for me — a much milder version, and I know that there are people who have it mildly and those who just get the distorted vision, but at its peak, it isn’t just a headache — it’s an unbearable painful explosion of the senses. This from Wikipedia — “Doctors recognise it as a complex neurological disease involving specific brain changes, nerve signals, and blood vessel activity, rather than just a simple bad headache.” “There is currently no absolute medical cure for migraines.” Or is there something that wards it off? Ask me about it next time you see me.

Music today has been Echo & The Bunnymen. They have a new album coming in September, Apples For Isaac with the late Clem Burke playing drums on the bulk of the album. We lost original drummer Pete de Freitas in a motorbike accident in 1989. It’s been a bad week for drummers. The first single was Brussels Is Haunted and the second The Light That Surrounds You. Release date for the album is 18th September.

Music Of The Daze

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:24:25 GMT

I missed getting the sacks yesterday so I went to pick them up today - they were kinda light. I was on a non-psychedelic mission today, hitting lots of different shops for different things, adding the things I wanted in my head as I was walking. After the lottery sacks, I went to the pharmacy next door to ask them if I could continue getting prescriptions like migraine medicine for example if my doctor is on holiday in the Saturn rings. From there to the repair shop where you can pick up your packages - I wasn’t notified yet, but experience tells me that just because you weren’t notified doesn’t mean the package isn’t there - it wasn’t.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:34:59 GMT

It was sooo hot today, the studio room was hotter than I can remember - I went out just to see if it was the same outside, and it was. So without wanting to sit in the cafe on the square, I did anyway because I felt like the heat was holding me hostage and this was my way to show it I was free from its grip. I ordered a soft drink with ice, but the heat started to fight back and I had to go back inside to get more ice in my glass as the heat’s clammy fingers tried to stop me. By the time the cafe was closing, it was on the way to 8 PM and it was still hot - that legendary soft Porto breeze was nowhere to be found.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:48:03 GMT

So Leicester beat Thailand in China, and London beat Manchester in Wales - where’s Poirot when you need him? But whilst the geography sleuths are working out the riddles - do you remember the first MOAT album cover? It wasn’t printed very well so it was hard to actually see what it was, but it was a photo that I took on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia/Peru on the way to spend a night on an island in the middle of the lake - and tonight I used my year old, new rice cooker for the first time to to cook quinoa. “Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) originated in the Andean region of northwestern South America. It was first domesticated by indigenous peoples around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Peru 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, following thousands of years of earlier use by pastoral herders”.

To Where I Am Now

Marty Willson-Piper — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:33:13 GMT

What else would you do on a quiet Saturday except try and make concoctions out of a fridge full of things you don’t usually buy? It’s hard getting into a different routine, especially because a lot of the healthy stuff takes some serious preparation. So I waited till I was dying of hunger and took leftover broccoli and veggie sausages and told them that everything was going to be ok with the tin of baked beans. Tomorrow I have to get more prepared for this change in habits.