Stephen Hero aka Patrick Fitzgerald (Kitchens Of Distinction) releases brand new album Convalescence. In the drear of Covid I was drawn back to the memory of the AIDs pandemic of the 1980/90s which, in comparison, was invisible and unimportant to governments and most people. No restrictions or lockdowns back then, instead mockery and the threat of prison islands. Having been perceived as high risk in both situations, and weirdly not having died in either, I felt like I had cheated the odds. And I needed a lie down. In the studio the old sounds of loud electric guitar, ping pong delays, juddery reverbs summoned me back. Piano songs shifted from the baroque acoustics of my previous record Deciduous Eccentric (2019), swooping back thirty years to the days of Kitchens of Distinction. Smudged saw tooth rock, sprinkled with a light icing of gaze, and smothered in the usual sour voice looking for answers, only to find phantasms, map rooms, breathing apparatuses, exorcists. In bed, the dreams and memories commingled. In bed the old writers languished: Marcel Proust wheezing his asthmatic way through tiresome exquisiteness, Truman Capote driving his pencil through the heart of those he loved. The names of hateful viruses, the names of the1980sdead (what if they hadn't died? what then?), the emergence of an elderly minotaur, blind from years in his maze, brought out to graze the fields and ponder. What the f*** was all that illness and dying about? Sighing with Hans Castorp up the Magic Mountain, where time stagnates, where life limps along, where winter is endless, and each day an empty bed fresh for the next ghost. Imagine us gone. Yet somehow we live. It's quite the task. Time for a lie down. Time to recuperate. A convalescence. "