Diary Of A Busker Day 2528 Wednesday April 23rd 2025 Winchester.
Late afternoon and yet again no one at the top spot…and I have a stroke of luck. A bunch of tourists emerge from the alleyway and stop to listen to the tour guide rant on about the monument behind me. I finish whatever I was playing and go into The Third Man which is greeted with smiles and nods from a fair number of them, all in their 70’s or early 80s, I reckon. A man comes up and says ‘Ah, we are from Vienna and you play The Third Man!’ Now, what are the chances of that? I got a bit of coinage but nothing much. Maybe they’d just spent all their dosh in the cathedral – in fact, this bloke who talked to me asked if I could play Winchester Cathedral so I attempted a few bars. Proper “busking”, that was. I don’t know, maybe I’ll learn it properly one day. Speaking of which, I’ve got a bit better at Waterloo Sunset, having learned how to play that difficult bit but the whole thing needs refining via a few hundred more plays.
Another new one is J’taime, which, again, needs refining. I started learning it because the bloke on the bass guitar is Dave Richmond, who also played bass on Scott Walker’s The Old Man’s Back Again, which is how I got to hear about him. His playing on both songs is brilliant – he’s playing a black Burns Bison with black strings and I want one! Anyway, if I can get those two songs sorted, that’ll be two good additions to the repertoire. I might have to leave out the heavy breathing in J’taime, though. I might get arrested. In fact, it’s Jane who does that on the record, not Serge. Interesting, that.
Well, there must be something in the air because I sold ANOTHER ALBUM!!! Two albums in three weeks…that’s fucking incredible! And yet again, it was the “limited edition” red vinyl that the bloke wanted. ‘Everyone wants the red ones. I shouldn’t have bothered with the black ones!’ I said.