This album was made at 5 Mulberry Walk in London where I was staying for a few years before the house was sold. It was the house that Beatrix Miller the editor of Vogue lived in from the 1960s until she died in 2014. The house had also been owned by the famous Joe Carstairs, who was a member of what was called ‘The Fast Set’ a group of progressive, decadent youths in the 1920s, famous for their naked parties and drug taking. Carstairs lived upstairs and her lover Ruth Baldwin had the downstairs.
The house had absorbed the atmosphere of interesting people and good times and had not been re-decorated since the late ‘60s as the cover shows.
Here is Beatrix Miller sitting in the same room in 1964.
The album is made up of pieces all composed in this room except Postcard From St. Bonnet, which was made in France.
The Postcard series are all pieces of music constructed for other things; Postcard from Russia was made to go with a video I shot from the window of the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Postcard From Poland was made to synchronize with a film shot by Sara Tomczyk of an acrobatic plane that she shot from the window of her house in Torun, Poland. Miraculously she managed to find out who was flying the plane and she sent him the video of his performance, by chance on his birthday. The pilot said that he got the present he had always dreamt about. Postcard from Brighton started with the recording of waves on Brighton Beach and the flow of the piece is dictated by the rhythm of the waves. Initially it was a commission for a dance film made by Deborah Tiso.
The title track was very much made for the house, which a friend described as the sort of place Michael Cain’s character in The Ipcress File ought to have lived in.