The Police Diver's Notebook

Winterbrass - Jason Tyndall

2012-01-02T14:11:00.001-12:00

The Bureaucrat

"Below their message
Containing me under my office
He, 'neath those supplies used to stress it
Me in his office"

-from "Winterbrass", the new poetry collection from Jason Tyndall.

"Tyndall marvels and winces at our despair; his dispatches are humane, generous and quietly furious"
Publisher's Weekly
"Elegant complexity or exhaustive simplicity? Tyndall is the later-Wittgenstein of modern verse; of that which we cannot speak, we must allow Jason Tyndall to say it for us"
Independent
"An unfashionably honest howl of raw refusal; a refusal to accept the solipsism of modernity, a refusal to accept its ironical vanities, a refusal to accept acceptance. We are sleep-walking through a waking dream, Tyndall says, and instead of taking pot-shots at the Sandman we must placeMorpheus square in the cross-hairs. But - he whispers - what if we miss?"
Kendall Murray, Literary Review
"Tyndall speaks with a tongue that has licked the moon, kissed the stars and sucked the very heat from the sun. Muscular and fearless, he goes about his work with a deeply moral fervour."
Times Literary Supplement
"Through a kind of liturgical necromancy he digs up urban horrors, reanimates them as pastoral idylls, and invites us all to blow his horn of plenty"
Spectator
"Crucial"
Guardian


Jason Tyndall, yesterday

An advert from our sponsors

Ghosting The North

2011-10-05T12:45:00.002-12:00

When I covered Gordon Burn's sad death at the age of 61 I failed the spot this superb piece in the Quietus by Austin Collings which surveys Burn's achievements and looks at the 'Northern Noir' of his progeny David Peace. It serves as a fitting tribute to Burn's cryptic legacy. I have to disagree with Colling's criticism of Burn's treatment of character. 'Alma Cogan' is the finest novel I have read, and I found his creation and control of Cogan as a cynical, soiled star satisyingly complex. 'Happy Like Murderers' is the last word on True Crime; the exhumation and burial of a whole genre. Burn is not under-rated, but under-read; critically adored, while most of his potential readership simply haven't heard of him. As his prowess is acknowledged, his grip on the collective imagination can only tighten.

(This post originally published accidentally in the extinct Gravenhurst blog on 30/09/2011)

Bert Jansch 1943-2011

2011-10-05T12:21:00.000-12:00

We say goodbye to Bert Jansch at the age of 67; a modest man, a musical giant, and his influence on mine obvious. When I first listened to 'Jack Orion', and heard him cloak 'The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face' in medievalist mystery, I thought "I need to be able to play that", and every bit of guitar work I have engaged in since has been an attempt to prize it open, to steal its secrets. It hardly need be said that it remains intact.

I'm so busy working towards the completion of another Gravenhurst album, (Jansch rip-offs multifold) that I only seem to log in and post here when someone awesome dies. It's turning into a crap little obituary column; syndicated deaths, sour milk skimmed off the back of others' work. I must write something of substance soon and shift the focus of the Notebook back towards grubby politics and grotty culture. For now, put on a Jansch record and bask in dazzling rays of bright and beautiful musicianship.

Rest in peace dear Trish, we'll miss you

2011-01-14T07:34:00.003-12:00

Bookish-priapic

2011-01-06T16:19:00.010-12:00

A Core Foundation of my New Year’s Resolution Superstratum is (for internal administrative reference purposes: NYR2011SS-CF12pp12/nf_inf.x1.3)

[:] maintain optimal bio-rhythmic routine

Another is (for internal administrative reference purposes: NYR2011SS-CF12pp12/nf_inf.x1.4)

[:] maintain optimal creative routine(s) and subroutine(s)

A full explication of the issue is beyond the scope of this post but the essential worry is that the two objectives may be at odds. If so, then hopefully only contingently and not necessarily so, and nothing that can’t be smoothed out over the course of this week. (Though strictly I suppose I have a year, don’t I? Again, beyond the scope of this post...). In essence, I want to be awake at the same time as other people and I want to have a way of broadly measuring my work effort to attainment ratios. Though I’ve always been a night-owl it isn’t good for me, and doing something creative for a living can make it hard to know when one has achieved enough for it to feel ok to stop and do something entirely passive instead. But then, I do various creative things purely for my own entertainment, such as Ultraskull and most blog posts. And I tell myself that I want to do them more frequently, thereby setting myself up to fail to meet self-imposed standards of recreation. Dammit man, pull yourself together! The issue facing me right now is that I intended to get to sleep by two and get working by ten, but now it is six in the morning and I am laughing at a list of silly book titles I have written. The plan went wobbly around two when the film I was watching went on until three. Pretty basic planning issue there (note to self - see NYR2011SS-CF12pp12/nf_inf.x1abs.time – cf. “Time-keeping”). The film, 'Hallam Foe' was enjoyably moody and did nothing to aid my winding down for the night. And then... I felt my modish poise uncoil to the slutty scent of carelessly shaved pencils, bookish-priapic, all smeared ink and dirty erasers, the coquettish discipline of medium-priority administrative procedure... and before I knew it I had recommenced cataloguing titles for the Art, Photography and Slavic Youth Cinema section of the Ultraskull Mobile Lending Library. Oh God... It's half-past eight... how did we get to here? We have to stop doing this... we both know it's wrong... so wrong... we're so... bad... oh...

Kendal, Kimpy Transgressive Yoke: The Works Of Frami Rallentando (Taschen 1998)

Kipper, Kimpy Rheiner Knizia And The Lone Flame Steeplechase (Dover Editions 2002)

Kotterel, Jethpa Darius Tschevchenko's Arc-Weld Timepiece (Diode Club 19¬¬) * LARGE PRINT

Loperamide, J.K. (Ed.) The Best Of Ian Brady (Void 2007) * AUDIOBOOK AVAILABLE

Jackson, Steve & Livingstone, Ian The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain (Penguin, 1982)

Beegees, C.B. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid: Carlos Blessing's Nine Lives in Print (Taschen 1986)

Kermode, M. Living Loose With Lucio - Ian McCulloch's Italian Cinema Career (Shox 2002)

Strategy 5 The Strategy 5 Manifesto (Strategy 2005)

Dogcollared-Greens, Delia Intention, Pretension Or Purely Convention? How to Choose an Effective Title For Your Non-Fiction Book - A Multi-Titular Approach - Plus! Not Forgetting... ...the Use Of Dots!* *And Be Sure To Get An Asterisk In There For Added Inanity - //NEW EDITION! Fully Revised And Updated To Accommodate It's Own Claims! (Keep Going -Ed. 2009)

Cancer, Nancy Please Daddy, No! Etcetera: Dispatches From The Bravely-Overcame-Shame-For- Financial-Gain-And-Talk-Show-Fame-Gravy-Train (Cake & Eat 2003)

FIN.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Police Diver's Notebook in Association With Damaged Goods
is proud to offer you

The 'Back To Papa' © Method: Ghost-Writing The Trauma Victim’s Routine Misery Into Sparkling And Highly Marketable Trauma-Porn

*This Newly Expanded Multi-Media Edition Of The Award Winning Classic Grief-Writer's Tool-Kit Is A Complete Life-Spanning Guide To Coaching Your Cash Cow All The Way From Abused Child to Regional Television Chat Show Star!! Damaged Goods Have Never Been So Lucrative!
*THE tried-and-tested method of gaining the shaky confidence of your understandably cautious and guarded Potential Client. The sure-fire way to convince them that you are the first and last person they can fully trust, and despite the enormous difficulties they face admitting even to themselves the full horror of their past, they are nonetheless going to tumble their guts into your greedy lap
*The innovative 'Back To Papa' © Method: A Life-Long Misplaced-Loyalty Maintenance Strategy!
This method of re-gaining said trust (squandered by recklessly fucking the client's husband/wife/child etc) ensures that even the vilest of betrayals will see them stumbling 'Back To Papa' © and once again eating from the palm of your hand
*'The 'Father-Confidante' Technique © ensures significant returns with next-to-no initial outlay. A radical departure from Grief-Writing orthodoxy that allows you to significantly widen your Catchment Pool. Acting in the role of 'therapist' means that Future Clients will pay you to hear their sob story from the get go! Certification from our affiliated college provides professional-seeming Counselling credentials. Tap into a fresh, naive and reliably damaged client base!

The Classic Grief-Writer's Tool-Kit is firmly established as the industry-standard and includes:

*'Choose Your Own Adventure'-style infinite plot generator. This sinister piece of software uses your ghoulish choices to construct multiple story arcs of unparalleled misery peppered with salacious detail followed by a significantly shorter section about healing and inner strength.
*Recovered Memories Generator - create entirely plausible abuse scenarios in minutes - random algorithm guarantees a unique horror every time
*Know-Your-Boogieman-Archetype Identifier -be confident you’ll never lose focus of the Bad Guy in the tale, consisting as it does of only two characters
*Free haunting child's scrawl of forlorn alleyway
*Copyright-free photos of ‘inspirational’ landscapes, sunbeams through clouds, rainbows etc. (doubles as a DIY Christian Greeting Card Kit)
*Access to online database of literally hundreds of photos of people looking the other way
*Legal advice Hotline
*Not available in any shops

www.backtopapamethod.com
Express Order Line 0800-000-0000 and quote 'Police Diver's Notebook'

'Back To Papa' ©, 'Father-Confidante' Technique ©, 'Grief-Writer's Tool-Kit' © and 'Classic Grief-Writer's Tool-Kit'© are all registered trademarks of Damaged Goods LTD. The Police Diver's Notebook is a Silent Age publication. Silent Age Records is a member of the Aetus Arcanum group By Appointment To Her Majesty's Prisons

Thought For The Day: "Particularly when it comes to formatting, Blogger is fucking shit."

Gravenhurst news

2010-10-30T07:45:00.003-12:00

As I haven't posted anything for ages, I thought I'd paste in the latest Gravenhurst mail out, thus contravening my self-imposed regulation of keeping this blog independent of my day job (not taking my work home with me). New song lyrics aside, the mail out is the most creative thing I've written for a while so what the hell. Here we go.

Greetings people of refined taste and discerning proclivities. And hello to the dull, the indifferent and the moronically incurious. And the horrifyingly pointless. All are welcome here.

I am roughly half way through the creation of the next Gravenhurst album. I will however be taking a break from writing and recording in November because Paul Smith of Maximo Park has a solo album coming out and he has invited me to perform as the main the support act on his tour of Europe and the UK, and naturally I said ‘Fuck yeah’. So here are the dates.

Thursday 4 November, HOLLAND - Amsterdam, Sugar Factory

Friday 12 November, ITALY - Milan, La Casa 139

Saturday 13 November, ITALY - Rome, Blackout

Sunday 14 November, ITALY - Mirano (VE), Moon Club

Tuesday 16 November, SWITZERLAND - Luzern, Bar 59

Wednesday 17 November, SWITZERLAND - Fribourg, Café de la Fonderie

Friday 19 November, SWITZERLAND - Zurich, Plaza

Saturday 20 November, FRANCE - Paris, Fleche d'Or

Sunday 21 November, BELGIUM - Brussels, Botanique/Rotonde

Tuesday 23 November, UK - Southampton, Joiners

Wednesday 24 November, UK - Oxford, Jericho

Friday 26 November, UK - Nottingham, Bodega

Saturday 27 November, UK - Leeds, Brudenell

Sunday 28 November, UK - Birmingham, Glee Club

Monday 29 November, UK - Bristol, Thekla

Wednesday 1 December, UK - London, Bush Hall SOLD OUT

Thursday 2 December, UK - Manchester, Deaf Institute. SOLD OUT

Friday 3 December, UK - Glasgow, Classic Grand

Saturday 4 December, UK - Newcastle, Sage 2

I will be playing at least four new songs and several old ones, switching between electric and acoustic guitars as quickly as possible and trying to avoid wasting time repeatedly tuning up. I will as ever be accompanied by a number of drone-making electronic devices. I am assured by a reliable source that the Deaf Institute in Manchester is haunted and that three-part harmonies may be provided spontaneously by the resident revenants who are doomed to wander the eternal limbo between the realms of the living and the dead, unable to rest in peace until they find that fucking stereo mini jack to quarter inch patch lead that some cunt from the support band accidentally-on-purpose wandered off with after a gig that ended in disaster when part of the building collapsed, trapping the group of singers back stage for three days over the course of which they were driven insane by a monumentally pedantic sound engineer. By the time rescue workers reached them they had smeared the walls with their excrement and eaten their own eyes before finally strangling themselves to death with XLR cables. The sound engineer was found unharmed, lucid, and fervently espousing his position on the problem of phase cancellation in applications involving multiple microphone placements.

Hope to see you there.

Nick

ULTRASKULL IS BACK! 100%! NEW: MINI ISSUE THREE

2010-05-12T15:14:00.003-12:00

Ladies and gentlemen, after a long period of mysterious absence, Ultraskull is back on the web, with a *new third installment*. The previous issues have been improved so the pages load faster and are a bit less crap. You can't polish a turd but you can stick a flag in it, and the Ultraskull avatar stands strong and proud against the forces of tyranny, fanaticism and etc
More importantly, the new issue, while on the slim side, and an inexcusable three or so years in the making, contains a new Spade Warrior strip, plus new characters Keith Harris and Orwell, Terry & Dune and more, presented by new Editor Mr. Skeleton, and Guest Contributor Master Rod. And naturally, now it's back up and running, Mr. Skeleton welcomes contributions for a fourth and hopefully much bigger edition. Please bear in mind that Ultraskull is PROBABLY NOT WORK SAFE.

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/ultraskull

Coming soon: an Ultraskull Facebook page...because everyone else does that.

In addition, the Silent Age Records site is back up. Though the label is on hiatus until I repress the Gravenhurst debut 'Internal Travels', for those already acquainted it may be worth checking out to find out what everyone who passed through the SA stables has gone on to do.

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk

Word.

signals on the wire/2151/ transmission one

2009-11-02T12:44:00.004-12:00

signals on the wire/2151/ transmission one

go outside for a fag. spiteful weather. raining cats and dogs. dogs and cats. cats, suspicious. dogs, don't understand. cats and dogs. pakis and wogs. pakis and wogs the taxi driver said, like my dad's mate frank used to say back in London in the eighties. not now. not round here. not in the centre of bristol. maybe on the inside but no-one's saying it. martin cabbied in Bangor for a bit after driving and managing the last tour. shit money; forty per cent to the company, the other sixty covers the hire of the cab, the diesel, the cleaning off the saturday night puke from the plastic seat covers, the windows and the sign that warns them about the fifty quid charge for puking on the plastic seat covers, the windows and the sign that warns them about the fifty quid you'll never get from them unless you call the police and spend the rest of the night wrestling over the fucking principle because you would have made more money if you'd cleaned it off yourself and carried on earning what's left of the sixty after rental, diesel, puke and casual racism from the cab office that isn't worth getting involved with but it costs you something to keep it on the inside, you just can't say how much it's worth but it's more than your job's worth to get involved. on a good night fourteen hours could take you home a hundred quid plus the tip- a bad penny thrown at the base of your spine creeping up to your neck sat down for fourteen hours, creeping up to your clenched teeth in the cab office on a break where someone's ranting at the news Enoch Powell said it! He said it fucking fifty years ago, rivers of blood, blood in the rivers, blood in your blood, blood in your clenched teeth in the cab office on a break where you don't break, you keep it on the inside, like you always do but it's chipping away at you, this bad penny tipped into the base of your spine, they build up these tips, creeping up to your neck creeping up to your clenched teeth in the cab office where someone's ranting at the news Enoch Powell said it! He said it fucking fifty years ago! Rivers of blood, blood in the streets, blood in your blood, their blood in your blood, their blood in your daughter's blood, poisoning the blood line, blood in your clenched teeth in the cab office where you finally break and punch the fucking racist cunt in his stupid fucking Welsh face.

but no martin didn't do that of course, he's older and wiser which basically means he's got his shit together, unlike me. and i wouldn't be cabbying in Bangor for as many reasons as there are rain drops caning down all around me as I smoke outside the flat that has been the most stable feature of my life for the last three years. the smoke is vile; I'm feeling it nowadays. Something changed when I turned thirty just like everyone tells you it does. It was a physical change; I had no mid-life crisis; there was no change in the profound chaos of my existence. fourteenth of may two thousand and fucked if I can remember was different only in that I reserved the bit by the fire at the Hillgrove pub in Kingsdown and I didn't have to pay for the drink and the drugs.
--------------------

Listening:

Distance - My Demons
Distance - Repurcussions
Boxcutter - Oneiric
Boxcutter - Glyphic
The Bug - London Zoo
Steppa's Delight 2 (Comp)
Hatcha's Ten Tons Heavy Mix (Planet Mu) - VA
Excision's Darkside Dubstep Mix - VA
Ikonica's Vice Magazine mix - VA
Broadcast and the Focus Group investigate Witch cults of the Radio Age
9 Bach - 9 Bach
2562 - Unbalance
2562 - Aerial
Tang - Another Thousand Days Out oF This World
Recession Vol. 1 - VA Mixed by October - (Caravan Recordings)
emptyset - emptyset - (Caravan Recordings)
Techtonic Plates vols 1 & 2 - VA mixed by Pinch (Techtonic)
Warp 20 Chosen - VA
Warp 20 Recreated - VA (Warp Artists cover Warp Artists)*

*includes Gravenhurst cover of Broadcast's 'I Found The F'

Reading:

Tom McCarthy - Remainder

Just The Weight Of The Water

2009-09-07T01:51:00.008-12:00

Blasting out Slowdive's 'Machine Gun' really fucking loud while on gruelling, unremitting hold to the National Insurance Contributions Helpline For The Self-Employed, I looked up the numerous and touchingly pollyannaish interpretations of the song's impenetrable, delay and flanger-soaked lyrics. I once interviewed Neil Halstead; he couldn't remember them. (I have now had the pleasure of playing shows with him; naturally, he still can't remember). I briefly met Rachel Goswell while interviewing Mr. Halstead; she couldn't remember. And if 'Machine Gun' is a challenge, try 'Souvlaki Space Station'. Slowdive are clearly very strong candidates for Band Holding The Most Unequal UK Music Press Villification To Enduring Fan-Adoration Ratio, awarding them a perversely righteous honour. They deserve more. Director Greg Araki is a massive fan; he has used their music on his films throughout two decades, from his underground days pioneering the New Queer Cinema to his mature work such as the astonishing 'Mysterious Skin'. The excellent Morr Music released 'Blue Skied an' Clear', an interpretative tribute album of Slowdive 'covers'. Writer and promoter Nat Cramp champions them; his Sonic Cathedral is subtitled 'The Night That Celebrates Itself', knowingly co-opting a tired old press criticism of the shoegazing 'scene'. And obviously, for what it's worth, I love them too. Slowdive were treated so unfairly and viciously by the UK music press that it hurts. But the young generation of fans have grown up and are settling old scores on the band's behalf. And we will win you know.

RIP Gordon Burn January 16, 1948 - July 17, 2009

2009-09-01T13:51:00.003-12:00

The finest living English writer is now among the dead, which ups the competition considerably. Somehow I only just found out.

He rendered true crime as fiction; his novels read like brilliant reportage. His work trounced any easy distinctions between the real and the imagined. Google for obits. They mostly read the same, paragraphs quickly garnered from his publisher's press release. His work: fiction -start with 'Alma Cogan'; true crime - if you can go there- 'Happy Like Murderers', his startling account of Fred and Rosemary West. His sport writing- 'Pocket Money' and 'Best and Edwards' got me interested in Snooker and Football respectively; I previously had no interest in sport. I only read them because they were the work of England's finest living writer.

____________

This blog has been neglected because I've managed to scrape together some, largely pseudonymous, paid writing work. The Police Diver: Commercial Division. Once I have established a rhythm the Notebook will return to form, I promise.

Listen to me, Butterfly

2009-05-25T10:06:00.008-12:00

Here's a piece for Venue magazine, previewing a Handsome Family show at the Bath Fringe Festival on May 28th.

"Listen to me, Butterfly. There's only so much wine you can drink in one life and it will never be enough to save you from the bottom of your glass.."
That’s a Handsome Family lyric from their 2000 album “In The Air”. It’s enough to make any fellow song writer wonder whether there is any point bothering. The succinct wisdom and effortless romance makes me feel like banging my head repeatedly into the table top and cracking open a bottle of red. The Handsome Family are Albuquerque-based husband and wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks. She writes the words, he writes the music, and with her peerless lyrical gifts and his staggering ability to sing four part harmonies over several scales one can be forgiven for thinking they really are an extended family. Like the Carter Family, or something. Or even earlier. Before anything was recorded. When songs evolved and existed only for themselves. In the old days, when Folk music was replete with depressing lyrics about famine, suicide and murder. The duo’s early single “Arlene” was banned from the radio for that very reason. As ever, our self-appointed moral guardians are ignorant of their own history.

The Handsome Family's All Music Guide entry reads like someone grasping at straws in a monstrous stack of needles. “Neo-traditional alternative country-folk” it says. This absurd fixation with genres is the recondite preserve of the journalist and is rarely shared by your average, sane music lover. Normal people just file their albums A to Z or not at all. Couldn’t it be that so many hyphens in a description be the sign of something, dare we say it, original? But there is something to the “Neo-traditional” bit. The Handsome Family sound like they missed out the last century, and arrived straight from the American Gothic. That’s where sallow, grizzled pitchfork-wielding farmers stare glassy-eyed into the lens bearing the silent burden of countless cot deaths, failed harvests and a fire and brimstone God who hates everyone’s guts. A picture which, in the graceful and supremely talented hands of the Sparks, is rendered both darkly sublime and very funny.

Venue - Bristol and Bath's weekly magazine
The Big Gig Feature
Issue number V869
www.venue.co.uk

______________________________________

Magazine publishing is an industry that is quickly affected by economic downturns. The perception of magazines as luxury items may lead people to stop buying them, but more crucially, reliance on advertising revenue means they suffer the knock-on effect of other concerns tightening the purse strings or folding altogether. Sadly, Plan B magazine is no longer with us. Each month, hundreds of left-field artists will get even less coverage than they already do. Plan B was a magazine you could buy in a regular newsagent and read passionate articles about bands you would otherwise have never heard of. "Why I Hate Rock 'n' Roll', reprinted here not long ago, was commissioned by Louis, the editor of Plan B, and I consider it to be my best piece of writing.

At least we still have John Doran's the Quietus.

Bi-Frontal Stereotactic Sub-Caudate Trachtotomy And The Infinite Sadness

2009-03-11T02:18:00.000-12:00

Here's a piece I wrote for the February issue of Plan B magazine.

"If All Goes Wrong" - Smashing Pumpkins Documentary and Concert DVD

"I want my band back. I want my dreams back" said Billy Corgan, on his decision to reform Smashing Pumpkins, and booked a nine night residency at a small venue in Asheville, North Carolina. "I don't know if he picked Asheville or Asheville picked him, because Billy's all about chance" gushes his personal assistant, and I almost spit a mouthful of rum at the screen. If Corgan is 'about' anything at all, it is contrivance; a meticulously planned career, micro-managed down to the finest detail and executed with despotic narcissism. Teutonic blonde on bass - nice, check. Japanese-looking dude -very cool, check. And in order to make records, Jimmy Chamberlain, one of the finest drummers of his era. Corgan recently stated that "97%" of the recordings were the work of him and Chamberlain, confirming what everyone already knew- that the other two were mainly there for show. Corgan's finest song, 'Rhinoceros', appeared on the debut album 'Gish', and such purity of emotion would never be heard again. 'Gish' was overshadowed by Nirvana's 'Nevermind', and there was no way Corgan was about to let that happen again. From 'Siamese Dream' onwards, Corgan's arguable songwriting skills were smothered by desperate egomania. And so in 2007, Corgan sits in his hotel room writing songs in a white dressing gown that makes him look like a lobotomised mental patient. Each night he plays yesterday's new song to the fans. In a scene so jaw-droppingly onanistic it is difficult to accurately describe, Corgan stands out on a balcony strumming his guitar, and a fan arrives with the gift of a plaster model of Corgan's head. Her friend died, and she found her body, and the only thing that pulled her through was the fact that Smashing Pumpkins were reforming. And then she made a replica of Corgan's head. And then she gave it to him. "It helped centre you, yeah, yeah" says Corgan, struggling to pay attention. Corgan meeting the fans -check. Back at the hotel, he writes a song about Nazi Germany, and bitches on about the pressure to play audience favourites, instead of putting them through a punishing three hour set of new material. "Why won't you play songs like 'Soma' anymore?". "Why do you ask?" Corgan spits back, recalling the natural grace with which he dismissed former bassist D'arcy Wretsky as a "mean-spirited drug addict" and blamed guitarist James Iha for the breakup of Smashing Pumpkins. Considering Jimmy Chamberlain's heroin addiction, sacking, rehabilitation and rejoining of the band, one might think Corgan would steer away from pathetic slurs regarding drug abuse. Never mind the fact that spending more than a few moments in the company of this man would have most normal people pulling their kitchen and bathroom to pieces for something to inject. Corgan then admits that he won't play 'Soma' or 'Mayonnaise' any more because they are songs he "identifies strongly with James". Basking in wealth and success, he cannot cope with the fact that Iha got a songwriting credit for some of the chord structures. "But I wrote the songs" he pleads. 'Zero', a single from the painfully constipated double album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' contains a moment of truth. Propelled by an undeniably muscular guitar riff, Corgan sings "God is empty/just like me". Checkmate.

Why I Hate Rock 'n' Roll

2009-01-21T09:59:00.004-12:00

I have been writing the odd piece for the excellent Plan B Magazine. In the next issue I shoot a very bloated fish in a very small barrel by reviewing a hateful Smashing Pumpkins documentary. Here's a more focused piece from last year.

Why I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll.

A few years ago my band played a gig at a venue in Nottingham. After loading in we were shown the ‘dressing room’. It was effectively a toilet cubicle without a toilet. It smelt like a crime scene. Suspicious yellow liquid dripped from a split pipe. The walls were richly spattered with the usual territorial pissings of long-gone or long-dead bands. Triumphant notches in bed posts or the chalk slashes of convicts marking their time, the real sentiments behind the symbols were unclear. But with the charm of a second-hand butt plug, the venue manager chuckled to himself that this was all “Rock ‘n’ Roll”.

And then everything clicked into place. I understood. Jaded promoters, parasitical booking agents, decaying P.A. systems, toxic dressing rooms, non-existent riders, imaginary contracts, indifferent sound engineers and the continuing existence of the flyer-deal: Rock ‘n’ Roll has nothing to do with music. Rock ‘n’ Roll is a masquerade that is used to justify and sustain a deep-rooted culture of complacency, cynicism and ineptitude.

In a classic example of the British habit of celebrating all the very worst things about our country, we call a certain network of small venues around the UK the ‘Toilet Circuit’. Touring it is akin to a homoerotic frat-boy hazing ritual, but instead of ending up with a tattoo of your mother's face on your balls, you accrue masses of debt and lose a couple of band members to madness and suicide.

Like the street cleaner who loathes but depends upon litter for his job, Toilet Venues need you but would really prefer it if you just didn’t exist. You will earn your stripes, you will pay for the privilege and you will promptly fuck off so they can put on a club night after your set.

Every node in the Rock ‘n’ Roll paradigm is self-perpetuating. Take the example of performance fees. Most bands assume they won’t be paid, so they don’t ask for anything. Promoters know this, so they don’t offer them anything. As a result, most bands don’t get paid. Booking agents are supposed to remedy this, but even ‘signed’ bands can have difficulty getting a booking agent. Agents can wheedle money out of people, but they can also neglect to tell you about a long-since cancelled show and leave you stranded and penniless in Saint Malo, lie till they are blue in the face and flatly refuse to remunerate you for their massive administrative error. This then becomes An Hilarious Rock ‘n’ Roll Anecdote, a well-worn propaganda tool that plays a crucial role in sustaining Rock ‘n’ Roll’s image of romance and roguish credibility. Agents can be useful in securing you support slots. Support fees are a standard £50, but no-one actually knows why. Ask anyone why it is standard, and in the fantastically circular logic of all ignoble traditions, they’ll tell you that it just is. But whose standard is it? Ah. I see. Of course. It is Rock ‘n’ Roll’s standard.

Rock ‘n’ Roll says that I am an indie bed-wetter spoilt by fancy jaunts to government-subsidised civic art spaces in poncey Benelux. Whatever. Superb commercial UK venues like The Luminaire in Kilburn are the exceptions that prove the rule: You Are Still Getting Fucked. Old toilets will survive as long as people continue to shit in them. Masochistic musicians will continue to get bogwashed into thinking they are stoics. The enemy hides in plain sight. It calls itself Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Today (unedited)

2008-12-11T11:06:00.001-12:00

Today I was forced to cancel a show in Sheffield due to a chest infection, not unlike the one I contracted last December, and the year before that. On the way back from the chemist I walked back along Ashley Road and turned onto Brook Road, where I saw a car hurtling towards me, at sixty to seventy miles per hour, completely out of control, a grinning child at the wheel, having the time of his life. Brook Road is very narrow, with only enough space for one car, so motorists tend to use it as a stretch in which to test their acceleration and breaking speeds. This child in a metal box, out of control, barelt tall enough to see over the wheel, zig-zagging from pavement to pavement, did not give me enough time to drop my bag and jump onto a wall. I don't think like that. I'm a human being; a rabbit in the headlinghts. But he gave me enough time to see his grinning idiot face. He was having a wail of a time as the car brushed past my left leg, continued for perhaps two more seconds to the T-junction with Ashley Road, where he crashed the stolen vehicle squarely into a passing car. Within moments the still-grinning child jumped out of the car and ran away. I'm no athlete. I wasn't capable of making a citizen's arrest. He disappeared. I phoned the police. I noticed another man doing the same. Recognised him, local bloke. Mad Mike. Crowds of onlookers circled the two smashed cars. I hung around long enough for the police to arrive. The owner of the stolen car turned up."That's my car!" he said repeatedly, bewildered. He had been car-jacked. Two black youths had bundled him out at traffic lights and taken his motor for a ride. For some reason, only one was in the car by the time it hurtled past me and into someone else. The driver of the other car was in shock but not seriously injured. I stood around long enough for the police to turn up so I could give them my details if they wished to question me later. I gave them my name in phonetic alphabet too quickly for them to get it. "Sorry, mate, it's your accent" the Bristolian policeman said. Tango alpha lima bravo oscar tango, I repeated. "Sorry", I replied, "Estuary English". Phonetic alphabet is the only worthwhile thing I took away from working in call centres, and in Bristol it was rendered useless, with my glottal stops and Thames Valley drawl. I left.

I nearly died today, by about two inches. The car brushed past my leg. I could have been grafitti on the wall on Brook Road. Real St. Paul's grafitti, representing the real St. Paul's. Not a cultural melting pot with a yearly festival of drums and juggling and bass bins and Carribean food, but a very poor and undernourished shit hole where fatherless fifteen year old kids car jack and kill people on joy rides.

My friend Jess said this may be a sign. If I had a watch i would have looked at it repeatedly, waiting for significance. I found none in the skies, nor on my phone. I went home, bought beer and watched Pan's Labrynth, for the third time. Today I nearly died. But I didn't. A few inches of random spacetime spared me. "I'll kill the little bastard" said Mike, a local I've known on and off over the years, a Montpelier figure. Mad Mike. Good bloke Mad Mike. He saw all of it. He was controlling the crowd, he was in his element. I left it to him, went home, I looked at my wrist, my still-functioning wrist where a watch will never be, because watches don't suit me, but I am still waiting for a sign. I am still alive. I'm not a victim of the Parish of St. Paul. What else do I want.

I hope they catch the little bastard. That's what I want.

Sloppy Thinking Day

2008-11-27T01:25:00.007-12:00

Max Webertron has just informed me that Saturday November 29th is "Buy Nothing Day"

"Saturday November 29h 2008 is Buy Nothing Day, It's a day where you challenge yourself to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from consumerism and live without shopping. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending! Buy Nothing Day is the biggest 24-hour moratorium against consumerism. People around the world will make a pact to take a break from shopping as a personal experiment or public statement and the best thing is - IT'S FREE!!!"

Right on! Punish an already wheelchair-bound economy and put more people out of work! Great job! This is the smug face of the ideologically decadent, economically and historically ignorant gentrification of the Left. They should try selling this shit to the coal miners in the 70's who couldn't afford to buy their kids a half-decent Christmas present.

We can quite comfortably leave buying nothing to the billions of people suffering in abject poverty the world over, thanks.

Anyone with some spare cash should spend it to help poor working families keep their jobs. This, 'Buy Nothing Day" people, is real 21st Century Socialism in action. Every Middle Class Lefty should put their money where their mouth is.

I personally know a few families who would benefit greatly from other people splashing out, not on them, but on themselves. If you are not too badly off, spend a bit at Christmas, help the retailers stay afloat and help people keep their jobs. There has never been an easier and more personally rewarding way to help the poor! All you have to do is buy yourselves stuff.

I am quite serious. These kind of simplistic 'Anti-Capitalist' ideas come from people who have never considered the other side of the argument because they don't know what that argument is. They don't know what Capitalism is. You could never accuse Marx of not knowing his enemy. Capitalists learned plenty from his acute analysis.

The best thing these 'anti-capitalists' can do is go back to the classroom, read Marx, read Weber's 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', familiarise themselves with the basic tenets of Keynesian and Monetarist theory, read up on the history of the labour movement, which in the UK was born not of Communist theory but of the workforce of the industrial revolution taking it upon themselves, through solidarity, strong leadership (sorry Anarchists) and force of numbers, to get a better deal. Anti-capitalists need to understand the history of peasant's revolts, the Diggers, worker's co-operatives, trade unionism and the importance of visionary philanthropists and Christian groups such as the Fabian Society in sermonising the moral necessity of of non-revolutionary, non-violent social reform.

Then, when they've all done their homework to a reasonable standard they can re-think their facile stance and see me after class.

-----

Wes, editor of Attack!!! magazine pointed "I usually buy nothing several days of the week." Same here. Didn't even think of that. Do these Anti-Capitalists harbour guilty secrets? Spiralling credit card debts and cupboards full of designer shoes they never wear? Doth the lady protest too much?

2008-10-15T12:19:00.004-12:00

Regarding Mark Ronson’s cover of “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before” by the Smiths.

Well, I was blind-sided.

In my gentle naiveté, I just took it for granted that anyone who 'got' The Smiths, and in particular appreciated this song as an example of Morrisey and Marr at the top of their game wouldn’t be capable of such arrogant, howling horseshit.

Which lead me to some thoughts about Johnny Marr and his pilloried post-Smiths career.

Even by the point of “Stop me…” Morrissey and Marr were still not functioning in the manner of a traditional song writing duo. They never did. Johnny was still sending guitar lines of verses and choruses over which Morrissey would sing his own vocal melodies with lyrics he had been working with, often before hearing any particular music. Sometimes it was the other way around, with Morrissey's lyrics inspiring Johnny's increasingly virtuoso multi-tasking. An early and particularly bewildering example is “How Soon Is Now”. This song would have been, purely technically speaking, a slightly simpler affair these days. But this was a world of pre-MIDI effects and click track software, so the song's syncopated juddering tremolo guitar and drum rhythm was spliced together from multiple takes. Johnny used at least one Boss Tremelo Panning pedal running through several amps. With this pedal, you set the rate of the tremolo effect, and the waveform (in this case a square wave) and depth (in this case as low as possible), hit the guitar and out comes the magickal "judder-du-du-du-du-du-du...." that throws your heart around the room. You try to strum along in the same timing and this can be done with practice, but you must change chords at the right time; that is, to the rhythm of the device, ignoring any natural rhythm you are building up. You can’t listen to yourself. You listen to the pedal’s output, and as an analogue device, the Boss Tremelo/Panning pedal itself goes out of time; it is not a stable mechanism. Mike Joyce, poor sod, had to play along to this and stay completely in sync not with Johnny but with the pedal. Thus, after about 20 or so seconds, they would understandably lose the syncopation and do more takes. Eventually they pretty much got all the parts they needed down on tape. Johnny painstakingly spliced these together, adding countless guitar overlays and effects (I've counted at least seven). Andy Rourke overlaid bass, then they asked Morrissey in to sing. Morrissey was rarely in the studio. He would rarely do more than one vocal take.

The point of this rather technical anecdote is not specifically to demonstrate Marr's genius, though it indeed does. The point lies in the punch line, which I learned from Simon Reynolds' illuminating and importantly revised 2nd edition of 'Songs That Saved Your Life'.

Halfway through this particular session Johnny got a phone call from the van hire company they had been using for their recent shows. They wanted their van back. Now. Johnny drove it back, (for some reason I think it was to Rotherham), then returned to Manchester by coach or train and continued recording. This was completely normal. Marr is and always was a Stoic. Marr managed the band at this point, because Morrissey's instant, arbitrary dismissal of numerous contenders made it impossible to hire a professional. He would express his displeasure not in words but by sulking off, simply disappearing, incommunicado, for days at a time.

People wonder why Johnny never did much of note after the Smiths, whilst Morrissey created some great work, with Steven Street, Vinni Reilly, and especially, since 1992, his Rockabilly gang of Boz Boorer, Alain Whyte et al, who co-wrote the crowning achievement of his post-Smiths career, 'Vauxhall & I'. I say this to these people: Marr wrote nearly 100 songs before he was 24 years of age. He wrote countless masterpieces before he was 21. He ran the band. He managed the band. Morrissey did nothing at all but be Morrissey. We love him; that's what he does. But Johnny Marr did what Johnny Marr did, and what many people fail to consider is that doing Johnny Marr meant managing Morrissey. His work is done. Give the man a break.

Identity,1,2,3

2008-08-27T19:50:00.007-12:00

1

Breaching Police Diver's Notebook regulations, I'm going to write about my job. I've recently returned to playing solo shows, for financial, health and creative reasons. For the last five years touring has been planned according to the nebulous industry standard notion: loads of live shows = best method of album promotion. This logic leads to the idea of playing as many shows in a row as humanly possible for as long as possible in as many places as possible. As a result, any coherent memories of great performances in great company were ultimately beaten senseless by inhumanly long journeys in cramped vans, dragging my larynx around Europe like a silk glove through a paper shredder. Fatigue, boredom, self-destruction. Seizures, sickness, cancellations, reputation and financial ramifications. Vague recollections, repeat prescriptions. Singing for my supper through tonsillitis, and, now evinced, the Epstein Barr virus, finally, a doctor's note reads, 'Quiet, please'.

Seasoned fans finally at ease with Gravenhurst manifesting itself as a band, arrive once more, to a guitar, and one man.

*

I debuted my new solo set to fifty people in Bristol, then a few days later, played to thousands at Latitude. A band photo in the festival programme was unhelpful, but thousands of people were very quiet when I played very quiet, applauded loudly and laughed generously at the questionable jokes and rambling non-sequiturs I am forced to breathe into dead air while hurriedly retuning between songs. I mentioned ‘Gravenhurst’ three or four times, 'The Western Lands' twice, and introduced most of the songs by name, so with luck everyone knew what was going on and what to spend their money on.

I finished with Black Holes In The Sand, and a descent into a squealing wall of sound, highly pleasurable for me and of tolerable duration for the uninitiated –yes, I pretty much always finish like this, it’s just something I have to do. "You looked like you were really enjoying it" said Michelle, my masterly manager, without whom I would have lost my way years ago. She was right. I was. I have to focus hard to not forget lyrics; eyes closed from the distractions of things written on t-shirts, and occasionally wading through synaesthesia from simple partial seizures that churn sound into spores of colour, the kind of thing people spend good money on drugs for, but that day at Latitude, for a rare moment there I did indeed hit The Zone. The Zone is a different place for different people. For me it is the full realization that being alone on a stage with my songs is the only thing I will ever have complete control of.

It’s not only rare, it’s a fleeting thing too, and it has no qualms about turning on you. I stumbled out of the dark marquee into lunchtime on a hot sunny day. A clanging emotional dissonance, like listening to Radio 3 in an abattoir. I slept it off for three hours in the back of the car.

That really is why I keep my eyes closed, it’s not an act.

2

“Is Gravenhurst a band or is it just you?” This question crops up regularly. My answers may have sounded unsatisfying, pretentious or plain drivel, but by breaking the journalistic chain of Chinese Whispers and telling you myself, perhaps it will settle the matter.

I am not Gravenhurst, and never have been. Gravenhurst is the name I give to the music that I compose, perform and record. I aim to create, musically and lyrically, something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and ultimately, something more powerful than myself and thereby achieve a kind of transcendence. But it makes addressing an audience bloody confusing. After several years of quiet study I found the solution. Whether solo or performing as a band, I now wait until after the first song to say “Good evening. You are listening to Gravenhurst”. Intentionally exploiting a declarative sentence of extensional ambiguity! Sweet.

(I clearly care about this more than anyone else does.)

But equally, Guy Bartell is not Bronnt Industries Kapital, the musical outfit of which he is the principle composer, and myself a long-time collaborator. And, if you will allow me further metaphysical postulation, (you’ve come this far) neither Gravenhurst nor Bronnt Industries Kapital will cease to exist when we are gone. For our purposes at least, they are ideas, evolving webs of ideas, sometimes frustratingly static, sometimes moving in a way seemingly beyond our control. The ideas spawn music. Music is an irreducibly mysterious, non-corporeal entity. Music cannot die. Nobody I know would care to disagree with this idea, but then everyone I know is either a music lover or a musician.

Not convinced? Pour a drink and sit down. Right, basically, when bands form they choose a name. This vital ritual can be performed without much self-awareness, but the name has to be good, everyone knows that. Everyone present has at least some kind of understanding that choosing a good name and saying it with confidence is to tell the world that you are more than the sum of your members; you are a band; like a gang; a force to be reckoned with. Fortified with a unique typeface, and consolidated with the sigilistic, binding power of a cool logo, the right band name will practically carve itself onto toilet doors in the venues all over the British Isles from which it will never escape, and within a short time be covered by another name, pissed on, painted over. It's like it never happened.

A band must aim to be more than the sum of its influences, not its members. Some great bands only have one songwriter. Sometimes bands only have one member. When Bruce Wayne says he's not Batman, he is lying. When I say I'm not Gravenhurst, I’m telling the truth.

I’ve recently discovered some other musicians covering my songs. There is no greater praise than this. It is a touching experience, and all the more poignant in that they aren’t established or famous, but just sticking a Gravenhurst cover in amongst their own songs, playing small pub gigs or at home with their mates. It reaffirms my aim of achieving artistic Gestalt. I have written songs and they have taken on a life of their own. They are out of my hands now, and may become more powerful, in any chosen sense, than me. Late 1999, I had just written the ‘The Diver’ and showcased it tentatively in front of a few friends round someone’s house. Around the same time, at The Louisiana, Bristol, I was also covering ‘Sundays and Holidays’ by Red House Painters. There was no You Tube back then to prove it, but a circle is complete.

If a famous person covered a song of mine, it might be thrilling but it would not be touching. Judgement is notably absent in the circle above, it has no seat, no relevance. A famous cover version could bring me money and attention, and where there is money and attention there is judgement. What if I didn’t like it? What if I had to lie and say I did? Did they even mean it? Was it suggested to them by a dunder-headed major label marketing slag? Take the melody and make it more.. Street Soul? Did Mark Ronson really think Morrissey & Marr would like his emetic, crashingly ill-judged cover of “Stop Me..”? Did he even care?

A kid jamming out one of my songs in his bedroom and uploading it to You Tube- only one thing matters: he really means it.

Why this blog died for a while

2008-07-27T13:26:00.002-12:00

Re: STEWART LEE – AUGUST 2008 NEWS

Dear Mr. Lee,

It would please me greatly if you were to perform your current routine in my home city of Bristol, and I write in anticipation of facilitating such a venture. I will however be touring my broadly non-comedic Warp Records-signed musical act Gravenhurst over the next few months and it goes without saying that encouraging you to book a show on a date when I am not here is not in my interests.

Now, you will likely have just noticed that after breezily asserting that something 'goes without saying', I then immediately proceeded -prima facie redundantly- to say it anyway! What was that all about?! Well, I did it intentionally, in order to emphasise that my presence at your anticipated Bristol show is absolutely crucial. I wanted to ensure that this is fully understood.

The provision of an Excel spreadsheet detailing my forthcoming itinerary would greatly increase the chances of our arranging a mutually convenient date for your performance. I appreciate that this will involve time and planning, but I am sure, indeed convinced,.....to be quite open with you Mr. Lee, of an impregnable faith, a staunch, unwavering faith; always intense and quite profound, sometimes transcendent, overwhelming even, I struggle to contain this famished, untameable beast of raw, indiscriminate belief, deliriously craving divine punishment, writhing in a demented state of near-masochistic arousal at the prospect of God's pitiless faith-tests, abandoned naked, powerless and hopelessly burdened by the pathetic, pleading fate of all humanity, laden with the wretched weight of infinite lost souls screaming impotently for His deaf mercy, and yet, and yet- I stand proud, erect and sure of foot upon the unshakeable foundations of my own blind credulity, nourished -nay! consumed by a searing, pistological madness --deeply troubling to my friends, family and work colleagues and unspeakably mind-shredding to even myself in its corporeal manifestations of increasing frequency and no prior sign or warning; patternless prolapses of spittle-spraying, tongue-chewing, lunatic ravings and self-mutilation; tenebrous dread-dances of demented contortions and jeering, mocking, cackling laughter, head and limbs jerking and flailing wildly in a spastic rictus of unbearable pain emanating from the deep, deep, deathlessly deep soul-drowning sea of myopic conviction that the gig will probably sell out in advance and it'll be totally worth it.

Or I could just come to one of your London shows.

Nick

English trash in Belgian bins

2008-04-21T12:44:00.003-12:00

Godfrey Mason, an Englishman with a very Flemish walrus moustache, runs the English Bookshop at Ajuinlei 15, Gent, Belgium. It’s prima facie as good as any in Bristol or London, but I choose to judge second hand bookshops on an esoteric evaluation of the contents of their bargain bins. Anyone can work out which buzz-authors to feature prominently in a display window; a solid working knowledge of the truly worthless publication is a different matter altogether. Best-selling titles by Danielle Steele and Virginia Andrews may clutter the shelves in multiple copies but these are not bargain binners. These hacks will continue to be read by generations. Pulp horrors by Guy N. Smith and Shaun Hutson will always be picked up by people like me for their camp, violent content and wonderfully lurid covers. And Stephen King is a good writer who deserves to be read. No, the rain-lashed pavement bargain-bin is a unique and oddly complex world. Its contents are by necessity painfully dated and drearily obsolete. It is a damp, depressing, yellowed hinterland of specifically useless old shit.

Here’s some of the results of Mr. Mason’s decisions:

Scandal! – Janet Street Porter

-I couldn’t get past her face on the cover to tell you what this one was about. (One feels obliged to talk in the past tense about something so anachronistic and downright vulgar)

Survivor – A Tribute to Cliff – Tony Jasper

-This is a book about Cliff Richard.

The Secret Life Of Sooty – Geoff Tibballs with foreword by George Harrison

-Sooty was a hand puppet bear operated by Harry Corbett, and later, his son Matthew Corbett, on the British children’s television programme The Sooty Show. The irrelevance of this volume cannot be overstated.

Surrey Walks: An Illustrated Guide – Walter Jerrold

-This book was published in 1907. The illustrations are hand-drawn. I grew up in Surrey, and I’m afraid that Mr. Jerrold would be most disappointed to hear that so many of his favourite haunts are buried deep beneath the M25 Orbital. “A most refreshing diversion into the village of Chessington may be attained via the Pilgrim’s Way…” etc. Nope. Not any more pal.

Advanced Microwave Cooking For All Occasions – Harriet Anderson
-Variations on this delusory theme are available everywhere.

Inside the shop the shelves bulge in elegance and order with sections on the paranormal (“In Search of Lake Monsters” by Peter Costello stands out as a sober and scholarly work among countless manifestly incorrect prophecies of Armageddon for the year 2000); killing people on the sly (“Ninja Secrets Of Invisibility – An Illustrated Manual” by Ashida Shim; contains loads of photos of men not knowing there are ninjas standing behind them); the age of steam, deep sea diving, prison camps, fiction, gambling, geography and economics (“Who Owns London” by Shirley Green – answer: the Queen, the City Corporation, some Aristocracy and a bunch of oligarch ex-Soviet double agents, but she stretched it out a bit). In short, Mr. Mason runs a very well-stocked and charming English book shop in Europe and he knows exactly what to throw away. How did I go about thanking Mr. Mason for this rare pleasure? I have brought seven books on tour with me and read none of them. You can’t digest much of substance when the world is hurtling past you at 80 mph. It’s a well-documented problem, hence the recommendation of ‘page-turners’ and ‘holiday reading’. I sheepishly left the shop with a 3 euro copy of "Nemesis" by Shaun Hutson. I paid with a 50 euro note. Sorry Mr. Mason. I should have bought the book about Sooty as well. I can now think of a number of friends who would have found it briefly amusing.

Busines as usual, or, watching 'The Deerhunter' on Ketamine

2008-04-11T04:40:00.000-12:00

I am a sensitive man. It doesn't take much to move me. The whole film could have consisted of millions of fascist aristocrats defecating into an open sewer, but in the the trusty hands of Australian classical guitarist John Williams, Stanley Myer's theme tune 'Cavatina' has me sobbing my feet out of my of mouth. The signature masterpiece crops up regularly in the film, each time reminding you that you are a very emotional person and that this film is going to affect you on a fundamental level. Isn't Meryl Streep good? Yep, she's just great. It's a bit bloody slow isn't it? Yeah, it is a bit. Robert De Niro is cool. Weird how Christopher Walken already looks dead. Heigh ho. Then suddenly they are in the shit, being tortured by the Viet Cong with a routine sadism that is barely comprehensible. Robert De Niro initiates a heroic yet somehow credible escape from this hell hole, Christopher Walken subsequently goes bonkers and gets into Russian Roulette. De Niro tries to bring him back to Pensylvania. It doesn't work. You know what happens next.

One of my friends and I considered viewing this film as a masochistic rite of passage to be repeated on a regular basis. Whenever anyone asked 'what shall we watch then?' we would suggest ‘The Deerhunter’. It's been a while since i posted a proper blog entry, and seemed like a ripe old time to catch up with my fave Vietnam flick, this time accompanied by my fave dissociative anaesthetic and a similarly inclined friend. Two minutes in, one single glimpse of Christoper Walken's wet, lost-doe eyes and we have switched channels and put on Brian Eno's 'Music For Airports'. The film had been showing on Channel 4; 4 Plus 1 shows the same daily schedule of programs slightly later. At some point, with my companion and I lost in Legoland, I roll off the bed, fall on the zapper, switch channels and see Christopher Walken blow his brains out. Seemingly trapped in a horrific, endless time-loop of Michael Cimino's making, we stumble out into the kitchen and one of us throws up.

Next week: Watching 'Irreversible' on Dextromethorphan

interim

2008-02-09T11:43:00.001-12:00

This blog is not dead, it is just recuperating following a binge of hellish proportions. In the mean time you can check out the comments section where there has been some alarmingly impassioned but ultimately inconsequential tittle-tattle, and then check out this footage of Dire Straits on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Back then Punk Rock was in and any A&R scout worth her shitty retainer would have been desperate to sign X-Ray Spex, but this Geordie pub rock band were great and at least someone at Phonogram could see beyond the next line of coke and signed them.

Krill

2008-01-02T12:18:00.001-12:00

There is something definitely strange and perhaps vulgar about a funeral being announced as an event on Facebook. The tapeworm of social networking swallows up the only single human inevitable. The Blue Whale has no real idea that the flotsam and jetsam sieved through its baleen plates are living things, dying things, dead things. Funerals have always been announced. Notes in local newsagents and front windows; letters, cards, national newspapers even. It's the formula of Facebook that feels like someone has thrown a shitty plastic wreath into the works. 24 may be attending. 43 will be attending. 14 will not be attending. Bereaved relations want to contact everyone who cared about their loved one, but the sentiment is cheaply buggered by a web developer's macro marketing template. And it's nobody's fault.

Today I had another unsettling encounter with a small portable colour television. Clearing out my room, I uncovered what initially appeared to be the same villain that haunted my sleep one month back. But it was a different one. I was leant it half a year ago. I never got round to plugging it in. It was under the laundry basket, hemmed in by three empty gin bottles (time-lined, entropic: at first Tanqueray, then Gordon's, then Asda's) and countless Amazon packing cases. Moving house is stressful; according to some statistic of unfathomable origin it comes fourth after bereavement, unwanted pregnancy and divorce. My flatmate put it simply, "well, it's just change isn't it". It really is. According to animal experts of verifiable authority, changing the location of a dog or cat causes them more stress than changing their owner. For cats this seems obvious; everyone knows the Janus-faced little bastards don't give a shit about you. But dogs really do. They love you. They just get confused. When they wake up on a sink estate in Plymouth after five years in Royal Tonbridge Wells they will be bewildered. No more line-caught Yellow Fin Tuna steak for you, Muggins, it's mechanically-recovered lips 'n' flaps now. But that flesh-coloured shape on a stick that calls it by a new name is basically the same, as long it gives them plenty of attention.

We had five cats at one point. The smart ones died, leaving only Shitbox, and his mother, Mrs. Minkles. Were Shitbox to be transmogrified into human form he would quickly be recognised as a nasty right-wing thug. He still lives with his wretched, neurotic mum and he beats her up. He can't use the cat-flap. He sits there waiting for you to hold it open for him. Rather like Nick Griffin, he wears a suit and a mask and we're not fooled.

Someone took a shit on the front steps of my new flat. Exactly halfway down; it seemed planned; it seemed human. There is a porch beneath the steps with an electricity meter. They could have gone in there. I found an empty Benson and Hedges packet (underclass cigarettes according to my friend in marketing), fried chicken boxes and a syringe. A van goes round the area. 'Sex and Drugs Litter Rapid Clean Up Team' rather too proudly on the side; bubble lettering, graffito styles, community-friendly 'Hey Everyone!' (why not cameras and a documentary? Been done already), so I'll make a call and leave it to them. St. Paul's has its unfair share of problems, yet the rents are as extortionate as everywhere else on this island. The only people who benefit are the property developers and the debt traders. Switch everything for one day and then one night, just briefly, for Karl Marx's sake, for old times, go on. Some simple old-fashioned class war. Pimp their sorry smack-sick arses at 3 a.m. in the maddening cold then send them out again the next morning to clean up the mess.

"When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. " C. Wright Mills

"He responded to others' claims that his behaviour was boorish by behaving even more outlandishly. Critics were disarmed when he admitted to even worse character faults than he in fact possessed.. " On the character of C. Wright Mills

Ghosts on camera

2007-12-19T13:42:00.000-12:00

2007 is tucking itself into bed. Let us check upon the psychic health of the nation. How are we?

Now being tested in Bristol City Centre: Closed-circuit television cameras equipped with microphones and loudspeakers enabling surveillance officers (Randstad Employment Bureau temporary agency staff £6/hour-no benefits) to bark orders at their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile in New York, a new technology manufactured by Holosonic transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.

Used to promote a television series about the paranormal, the issue widens from one of privacy to one of general public sanity. Religious groups, anti-capitalists, civil libertarians, secular-humanist anti-theists and the merely understandably slightly bewildered should quite rightly be absolutely furious about… well, we’re not sure how to put it.

In his book The Minority Report Phillip K. Dick describes a world where people are punished for crimes they have yet to commit, on the basis of a single incriminating brain scan. The technology is here.

Talented marketers (governments included) know what you want before you even know you want it. Face, voice, lip and body language-reading software can have you analysed, predicted and soothingly horse-whispered -if not blatantly coerced- into submission within seconds of arriving at the store.
“What did you do when you got back from work last night?”
“I watched a television program.. I think it was about ghosts...”
“What are ghosts?”
“....um… non-corporeal entities that bring us confusing messages from another dimension…”
“No. Those are called adverts.”

We can read each others intentions and predict each others behavior with some level of accuracy. We may soon be able to solve future crimes, eavesdrop on private conversations whispered in public, interpret suspicious body language and radically tailor advertising to each individual’s needs, dreams and desires, and broadcast a telepathically bespoke portfolio of glittering lifestyle products directly into each other’s minds. Total information awareness. Late night one-click buy-it-now Freudian slip. Your darkest desires delivered straight to your door and in the fog of the morning you come quietly and help the police with their enquiries.

If we are all given the technology is it fair game? As the National Rifle Association likes to argue after each hormonal killing spree, if everyone carried a piece they could have taken him down much quicker…

CCTV surveillance is very popular with the public. Violent crime, knifings and shootings are perceived to be on the rise in London and other UK cities; and this may well be the case. We assume that surveillance serves as a deterrent. Does it? In the black hole crack-hungry soul of the time-blind drug addicted bag-snatcher, a deterrent is as meaningful as a tomorrow. And the people who casually threw a TV through our front window last month didn’t give a moment’s thought to being spotted, because they were just really pissed. In a liberal democracy, privacy and liberty should be the norm, and any infringements upon them must be qualified on a case by case basis. But the new climate of security is making bold demands. He is confident. His voice is loud. He sounds like he knows what he is talking about. He must know something we don’t. But he may be the thinly veiled edge of a malignant wedge. There’s a line to be drawn, and toed, somewhere, but it is hard to stay focused.

For the mystics and Pantheists among us, this momentous blurring of the private and the public may just be more evidence for the fact that we are all the same person. But nonetheless, unfortunately, we are having a massive argument with ourself.

Happy New Year, and may your Gods, or not, be with you.

Hill vs. Boorman

2007-12-07T13:01:00.000-12:00

Backwoods rednecks preying on arrogant city boys; John Boorman’s ‘Deliverance’ cast the mould, but ‘Southern Comfort’ is the superior film. Walter Hill’s tense and efficient action thriller sees a squadron of Louisiana National Guardsmen lose their way among the primal forces of the Bayou. Discipline and chain of command are negligible from the outset; on a simple training exercise, a cackling hothead fires a round of blanks at a group of Cajun trappers. The bickering, delusional toy soldiers are quickly out of their depth, hunted by a hidden culture that the American Dream told them nothing about. The pace is sharp and the script is smart. Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine quickly bond as two resourceful survivors caught in a clutch of hysterical machismo. ‘The Blair Witch Project’s debt to ‘Cannibal Holocaust’s faux-documentary style is well known; its gothic roots in Hill’s masterpiece less-so. The enemy is barely seen; it is ultimately the alien terrain of the swamp itself that swallows up the incredulous trespassers.

Sick as a Pike

2007-12-02T05:48:00.000-12:00

I currently have bronchitis after three weeks spent gargling in continental Europe's elegantly tarred communal lungs. The new issue of Plan B features my essay on Rock 'n' Roll. It is part of an ongoing project to map the gutters, sewers and storm drains of the music industry.

Pike are notoriously voracious carnivores and can be potential pests when introduced into alien ecosystems. When caught in the River Mole in the Eighties, fishermen such as my dad were instructed by Mole Valley District Council not to throw them back. You couldn't eat them, so you had to bin them. He cut one open to show me its disease-speckled liver. It was a bad fish. A bully. Throwing its weight around. It knew it was on the way out and it was going to take a few others down with it. Men standing on river banks with poles and lines and hooks are noble sentries in Gaia's gentle regime of self-regulation.

A small colour television set was involved in three separate crimes in the space of two weeks. First it was fly-tipped outside our house. A few days later, it was thrown through our front window. We dumped it back out on the street and it disappeared. Two days later it was found dropped off the bridge and onto the middle of the railway tracks at Montpelier station. There was a storm here last night. Fitful sleep; beneath the roar and moan, the sound of something rolling slowly back up the hill towards our house.

The Velvet Cell

2007-11-07T14:09:00.000-12:00

New police proposal: microphones to be added to CCTV cameras

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2007/11/walls_to_have_ears.html

"The parallel to eavesdropping on people's conversations is putting CCTV cameras inside their houses. I take it that at least most of us would object very strongly to the latter, even if in half a dozen houses round the realm some crazed fanatics were making bombs in their living rooms."

More 'threats to our liberty' to be countered by threats to our liberty.

One cannot ‘walk privately’ in a public place. By stepping outside one’s own home, one tacitly accepts that one will be seen by others. But one can walk down the road publicly whilst engaging in private conversation. Grayling is right: The parallel to eavesdropping on people's conversations is putting CCTV cameras inside their houses. To do so is to demolish the distinction between public and private.

Mike WM says in the Comment Is Free response to Grayling’s article:

Just run some speech recognition software on what each person is saying, cross-reference with the biometric data on file thanks to the ID card project to easily discover who each person is, and the information that can be gathered on each person in this fair country is amazing. Or, rather more accurately, terrifying. The pieces are nearly all in place. Are people going to see the jigsaw before they manage to finish it?

What is to be done? Most of the media is complicit in the notion that our privacy and liberty can always legitimately be curtailed in favour of our safety. But a man in solitary confinement is perfectly safe, provided he cannot find a way to hang himself. Without freedom and privacy, we may as well do so.

How much of your freedom are you prepared to compromise for the nebulous cause of 'safety'?

As ‘Knightly’ puts it:

I am afraid to say it is too late.

You are all doomed to be spied on, have your information sold to supermarkets and detective agencies working for your husbands and wives. Barely literate data entry clerks educated in sink comprehensives and paid the minim wage will confuse entries about you and rapists and murderers with similar names. You will be lynched by an angry mob when this information is disclosed under some spurious right to know legislation. Your credit ratings and criminal convictions will be available to council librarians who have tea with your mother. Your lives will become even more of a misery, than it already is, and to top it all you will be stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 and be fined for speeding due to an error in the number plate recognition software. Harriet Harman will tell you surveillance is needed to protect the rights of women, and use the information to increase cost of motoring. All the criminals will remain out side the system and untraceable, you on the other hand will be dragged through the bankruptcy courts for a parking ticket that was never issued correctly in the first place.

Leave now, it is your only hope.

But please don’t leave. Get involved. It isn’t too late.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The woman who lives directly above me is a student. She is fat and always wears jogging pants. She is in most days, and most days she puts on a CD. Most days she plays the same song on constant rotation. Some nights when she gets in from the pub, and some mornings when she gets out of bed, she celebrates life by playing the song once more. High and mid frequencies are cut off by floors and ceilings, so all I hear is the same maddening, moronic bass line and retarded drum fills. When I am at my most vulnerable or short tempered, when I am hung over or sleeping fitfully, the woman upstairs is sure to be in her element.

The malevolent power of music has long been known to the authorities. The FBI used it in the Waco Siege. Interrogators at Guantanomo tried to break the will of captured terrorists' by playing the music of Christine Aguilera.

It is one thing to complain about loud music. It is another to demand that someone expand their record collection or face serious consequences. Knuckles whiten, the jaw tightens. What will it be? The mixtape or the baseball bat?

Piece Of Mind

2007-11-02T10:17:00.000-12:00

In response to Alex's observation regarding my last entry title: yes; I translated 'Dude where's my country?' into the Queen's English. If the colonies made the effort to speak properly perhaps they wouldn't be in the mess they are in.

Ah... Michael Moore. What to do about Michael Moore. Scoring an instant own-goal by showcasing human-rights-ambivalent Cuba's apparently fantastic health services, he helps conservatives caricature modest leftist dreams as Stalinist nightmares. I don't doubt that your sense of outrage at poverty and corruption is genuine, but for God's sake man...

US television is awash with demented shiny-happy-people advertisements for antidepressant medications. Most can't afford them. Most don't even need them. To anyone who has grown up with something like the NHS -a patrician buffer between the patient and the drug companies- these look like the symptoms of a gradually encroaching Huxleyian dystopia. A buccaneer corporate state that rips you off with mind-altering drugs that you don't need; it's hard to think of a more morally outrageous scenario.

The thought police get all hard for justice

2007-10-09T02:36:00.001-12:00

I LIKE MY COUNTRY CAN I HAVE IT BACK PLEASE

Here it comes.

Stash your Jess Franco movies Anton.

The bill proposing to ban 'extreme pornography' was overwhelmingly approved yesterday in the Commons.

I'll have to rip out those scenes of crimes photos from my books on Jack The Ripper. This legislation outlaws simulated images of consensual, legal acts; God knows what it will mean for real images of illegal ones.

Pictured: Armoured man homo-erotically grappling with a reptile, complete with phallic symbolism

The proposed legislation targets material depicting (i) bestiality, (ii) necrophilia, and (iii) serious violence.

Images will count as illegal if they are pornographic and real or realistic (if staged).

Those found guilty of possession will be charged and placed on the Sex Offender's Register.

Quick, excellent summary of the bullshit here:
http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/summary0610.html

Get thee to a herbary

Away

2007-10-04T04:34:00.000-12:00

I'm kind of 'on holiday' from blogging right now, trying to finish the third issue of Ultraskull (not work safe) and rehearsing for the upcoming tour. I have written an article about the state of live music in the UK; it will feature in the November issue of Plan B magazine.

Homework

Exercise 1 a

Read this excellent piece in Foreign Policy magazine.

"The 'War On Drugs' is immoral, absurd and fatally counter-productive, and major players on the world stage are finally daring to admit it." Discuss. (20 points)

For more on drug regulation strategies read the Transform FAQ.

Exercise 1 b

Study the image below. What is wrong with this image? (30 points)

Westminster… we have a problem…

2007-09-05T11:28:00.000-12:00

The entire UK population and every visitor to Britain should be put on the national DNA database, a top judge said today. Today, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty, warned against potential changes to how and when British authorities collected DNA data. "The DNA debate reveals just how casual some people have become about the value of personal privacy," she said. "A database of those convicted of sexual and violent crime is a perfectly sensible crimefighting measure."A database of every man, woman and child in the country is a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse."

Aided by insufficiently robust political and media opposition, the agenda has been fully re-set. The onus is now on the civil libertarians to explain why we shouldn’t have a government with total knowledge of our identities, rather than why we should. What is absolutely extraordinary is that while the public constantly state that they do not trust the government, that they believe them to be dishonest and corrupt; that scandals over dodgy dossiers, donations for peerages, and the I.T. shambles at the Child Support Agency have eroded public confidence in the government’s integrity and competence, they are still willing to grant them total information awareness of the biometric identities and behaviours of people who have yet to commit any crimes.

Leftists constantly complain how private corporations are able to track our spending habits and check our financial status without our knowledge or permission, but when it comes to handing massive powers to governments, many shrug their shoulders. These stats make shocking reading. We don’t like private corporations holding private information about us. We get all hot under the collar about it. We think they brainwash us with marketing, and make us buy things we don’t need or want. We think corporations are evil and exploitative. But private corporations cannot arrest people. They do not have armies. They cannot put people in prison. They cannot invade sovereign states without UN mandates. Contrary to what appears to have now become received knowledge, governments are more powerful and thereby more dangerous than any corporation on the planet. Clearly, Paternalism has been massively successful. We have learned to love Big Brother, but to be suspicious of anyone trying to sell us frozen food.

Biometric identity information will be inherited by each successive government. If you don’t trust this government, what the hell makes you feel you can trust a future one? How would you feel if the British National Party got into power? They have already won seats in local government. What makes you think governments won’t sell your DNA profile to private corporations? What makes you think the database would never be hacked? What makes you think the database would never become corrupted and that everyone with access to it will be both 100% trustworthy and never make a single mistake?

I don’t like to employ slippery slope arguments. They only work when it can be shown that the slope in question is slippery, and for the average Daily Mail editorial, slipperiness is usually assumed without argument. But it seems to me crashingly obvious that given the behavior of this government, past governments, and the likely behaviour of any future government, this slope is about as slippery as it bloody well gets.

The Liberal Democrats have shown themselves to be toothless. I wrote to my MP about a scheme in Yeovil, Somerset whereby bars and pubs would only allow entry to punters if they allowed their fingerprints to be placed on a shared database. This was a system set up in partnership with the local police in order to deter known troublemakers. The government plans to roll it out nationwide. Naturally, the scheme is enforced on the door by bomber-jacket wearing bouncers, who presumably know the intricacies of the Data Protection Act inside out. The Right Honourable Member for Yeovil, David Laws, and my Bristol West MP Stephen Williams, are both Liberals and oppose government plans for ID cards along party lines; but they assured me that this fingerprinting system was voluntary. What defeatist, Pollyannaish drivel. Pubs and clubs will obviously come under police pressure to join and they will do so. I’ve worked in bars, I know how important it is to keep good relations with the decent, hard working coppers who have a difficult job to do. Few bar managers in the country will be so awkward as to refuse to join the scheme. How can a voluntary scheme be anything more than a de facto compulsory scheme when the resulting situation is absolutely identical? This is how the police state comes in: by the back door, through creeping measures rushed through parliament under cover of alleged terror threats, resulting in ad hoc legislation that is quickly accepted as the norm and used as precedent for further intrusion.

This documentary by Henry Porter is useful. If nothing else, watch the disturbing last ten minutes. As a demonstration, a security analyst bugs and spies on Porter via his own mobile phone, intercepts his wireless internet connection and duplicates an electronic data chip he had implanted in his arm. The security analyst then goes on to very quickly crack the security code on the digital information chip on a new passport (the technology that will be used on the proposed ID cards), and reads all the information off it. Terrorists take note: here comes the gold standard for identity theft.

But most importantly, watch Adam Curtis’s The Power Of Nightmares. And try to remember that you are more likely to die in a car accident than by being blown up by a terrorist.

Spitalfields… we have a problem...

2007-09-05T11:21:00.000-12:00

The only venue in the multiverse where you can perform in the gloaming, morbid shadow of Hawksmoor’s Christchurch will close at the end of September. They are hosting an incredible last-blast Festival of Folk. May the meeting of so many brilliant musical minds amidst the rich traditions, hidden depths and arcane symbols of the the East End ward off the crashing, cosmic emptiness of the property ‘developers’. Circulus are playing. Alisdair Roberts is playing. The Ralfe Band are playing. Mr. David Viner is playing. What more does God want from us? Without doubt the Spitz spirit will be angrily but triumphantly transplanted elsewhere. “Somewhere they can’t find me…” as Paul Simon once sang…

Diana Death Cult: Cthulhu Implicated

2007-09-02T11:57:00.000-12:00

Keith Richards on Princess Diana: 'I never knew the chick'.

Ozzy's take on the Virginia tech shootings: 'That's just fookin' crazy. You can't explain that'.

Despite massive, drug-induced cognitive impairment, these two coke-addled alcoholic rockers (one of whom bit the head off a dove) are among the few public figures still capable of looking through the correct end of a telescope. If politicians and pundits had even half a gram of Keith and Ozzy's integrity we could have ended all this nonsense years ago.

I was recently pointed in the direction of this Lovecraftian comic, the creator of which lists Freddy Kruger, Lord of the Rings, Wizards, and heavy metal music among his interests. Straight up. H.P. Lovecraft himself was an altogether more complicated man. In letters to his acolytes he stressed the importance of avoiding needlessly baroque descriptions. This advice came from a man who used the word 'Cyclopean' seventeen times in one story, and more than once on a single page of it.

"I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time."

At the very least he gave in-house illustrators plenty to work with. When critics say he was a bad writer many of his fans concede the point. For me he is like the perfect DIY indie band - shambolic, but with some really great ideas. Here he is then. Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Pastels of horror literature.

You may have noticed that I am using a great new application that tracks product links from my blog to various online retail sites and automatically deducts money from your bank account. Every book I mention here will be delivered to you without you having to order it. I have also arranged for someone to read the books for you, and then send them back to me so I can sell them to someone else. Trust me. I know what you want before you know you want it.

Booze Britain

2007-08-23T00:05:00.000-12:00

Britain

should consider making the legal drinking age 21 as it has "lost the plot" when it comes to regulating alcohol, policy wonks claim. The news comes a week after an advertising campaign for Carling Black Label lager featuring the slogan ‘get pissed and glass someone’ was greeted with universal condemnation. Think tank Public Policy Research (PPR), the British Medical Association and the charity Alcohol Concern all expressed the need for a change in the law.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the bit about the Carling slogan was true. After all, according to the self-appointed experts, the drinks industry is brain washing young people into acts of mindless violence. It’s funny, because whenever I see an advert for alcohol it usually features young people enjoying themselves and thinking about having sex with each other. The message recommending mindless acts of violence must be coming from elsewhere.

I do think there is something wrong with British culture. You don’t have to be a Daily Mail reader to see that we are visibly more thuggish and unpleasant than most other European nations. Go into any city centre on a Saturday night and you will see a tide of human scum wash out into the streets at closing time, attempting to crush and drown everything in its path. It’s well known that the French, Spanish and Italians don’t have quite the problem with alcohol related violence and yobbery that we have.

But the reasons are, as always, very complex. Raising the drinking age to 21 won’t make a jot of difference; the suggestion is completely laughable. Like most authoritarian forms of social control, it comprehensively fails to understand the nature of incentives. Getting wasted on cider in a recreation ground at the age of twelve is a national rite of passage. If kids want to get alcohol, they can do so easily. Drugs are illegal and obtaining them is no problem. People rarely avoid an illegal activity only because it is illegal. Rather, they tend to do so because they believe it is immoral, and the threat of punishment is often extraneous. People, quite rightly, don’t see why drinking is in itself wrong. Therefore, in order to stop people drinking under the age of 21, an extraordinarily draconian punishment would be needed to function as an incentive. Such punishments should be handed out only for the worst crimes, and all but the most hysterical, foaming-at-the mouth Daily Mail columnist would agree that drinking isn’t one of them.

Among the labyrinth of factors that influence social behaviour, there is one which the media is reluctant to acknowledge. A quick glance at the newspapers, both tabloid and broadsheet, reveals a climate of constantly stoked fear and panic. The rolling stock of topics include: terrorists disguised as burka-clad Muslim women, foreign criminals sheltered from deportation by human rights legislation, paedophiles lurking on every corner, filthy hospitals, asylum seekers, immigrants taking our jobs, homeowners being arrested over injured burglars, insurmountable personal debt, spiraling house prices, health scares, political correctness gone mad, market crashes, knives, guns, priests being arrested for simply saying that they think that homosexuality is wrong, cancer, cancer, cancer and more cancer. Many of these point to genuinely problematic issues, but the reports come to us swathed In alarmist rhetoric, sweeping generalisations and unargued assumptions employed to cultivate an atmosphere of paranoia and intolerance. Meanwhile, busybody health pressure groups and the ever encroaching nanny state are given a complete monopoly on the good life. The message is that the purpose of life is to live as long as possible and in constant fear of death. Never mind living well and enjoying life. There’s just not enough time!

It is no wonder that people feel hopeless. Many fear the world, hate their jobs and hit the bottle at 6 pm on a Friday night. Some get violent. With National Pride little more than an empty slogan, there is a British tendency to celebrate the worst things about our culture. Getting arrested and being featured on the TV programme ‘Booze Britain’ becomes a badge of honour. Each day we are offered not a single thing to feel optimistic about. And for this the parasitical British media must take a large share of the blame.

Below: a foreigner, yesterday

Richard Dawkins: Mind Cop

2007-08-22T05:24:00.000-12:00

Richard Dawkins: Mind Cop

Animated Series Watch in awe as Professor Richard Dawkins systematically destroys the comforting delusions of happy, normal people, replacing their vague, inoffensive belief systems with a description of human consciousness as an indeterminate quantum reality occupying four-to-five dimensional phase-space. With only a set of completely baffling non-recursive algorithms with which to make sense of their lives, these people of laughably average intelligence fail to grasp the meaning of it all and wander down to the garden shed, drink bleach and blow their fucking brains out. Meanwhile, watch in awe as Professor Dawkins sensibly abstains from love, sex, listening to music and all other non-rational activities. Episode One. Professor Dawkins discovers that he has a stick up his arse.

I’m all for Dawkins outing bullshit snake oil peddlers and ‘spirit-mediums’ who manipulate the grieving and vulnerable; these, quite frankly dangerous charlatans have it coming. But extending the circle of unreason to any system of thought that cannot be proven empirically or logically threatens to wipe away most of the things that make life worthwhile.

If people were truly rational, they wouldn’t fall in love. Painting, architecture, music, sex, gardening; none of these are rational. Magical thinking extends well beyond the major world religions and into all aspects of human endeavor. Private systems of ritual and symbolism have shaped countless great works of art. Hawksmoor’s churches, William Blake’s poetry and Alan Moore’s comic books would never have seen the light of day without the influence of madness, ritual, obsession, passion and the occult. Reason and creativity are, quite simply, uneasy bedfellows.

Religious and magical thinking only becomes a problem when it dictates social policy. Just as the moral dogmas of Imams and Priests should not dictate the law, the cost of spurious remedies should not be fronted by the tax payer. In a society with tax-funded healthcare, separating church and state means separating science and superstition. Medicine is about solving the problem of illness. There is no point in medicines that don’t work.

But in their privately funded private lives people should be left to believe and buy whatever comforts them, however ludicrous or offensive we might find it. Tolerance means putting up with things you disagree with so long as they don’t directly affect you, on the understanding that you may well do things that others disagree with. If I remember correctly, that is what liberalism is all about.

Hitchens: Sweating, trembling freak show

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are wrong about religion. It does not poison everything. Rather, it is often used to justify poisonous acts. But the major genocides of the last century have been committed in the name of class war, nationalism and racial purity, not religion. People do very bad things for all sorts of horrible reasons, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Without religion to justify their acts of carnage, they just find something else.

And talking of Godless genocide…

Don't Think I've Forgotten (Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll)

This film is still in production, check out the trailer. It puts the 80's British music press's class-obsessions into perspective, to say the least...

Groovy fascists

2007-08-07T01:57:00.000-12:00

A rather odd piece by Stephen Moss, the gist of which is: Hitler banned music by Jews, but listened to it himself, therefore he wasn't actually a Nazi; he was a 'man apart' from the cult of Nazism he had helped create. It's not clear whether Moss is sarcastically attacking a position that in fact nobody holds, or expounding it. Either way he sounds rather like a stupid person saying something stupid.

Surely the only sensible conclusion we can draw from the revelation is that as well as being a Nazi, Hitler was also a hypocrite. Hitler was like Viz Comic's Victorian Dad, 'studying' pictures of naked Amazonian tribes late at night in order to ascertain whether they are suitable for those of a lesser mind to see. A hypocritical fascist! Who'd have thought it! Well, those fascist types have really gone down in my estimation now.

1 x 1 = 11

2007-08-03T03:04:00.000-12:00

I've been enjoying the Facebook group 'F*ck You- George Galloway and Ken Livingstone'. The Right Honourable Member for Bow and Bethnal Green, who has just been suspended from Parliament, has long been allocated a special corner in my reservoir of disgust.

The Respect Party candidate, who was swept to power on the back of a motley collection of alienated anti-war voters, misogynistic, homophobic, Jew-hating Islamists and nasty little Trot agitators, has taken part in just 13% of parliamentary votes, preferring to spend his constituents money on cosying up to dodgy, self-appointed 'representatives' of Britain's Islamic community, touring the world with his clownish lectures, pretending to be a cat on Big Brother, and arguing with Christopher Hitchens. In May 2006 he surpassed himself by stating that it would be morally justified for a suicide bomber to murder Tony Blair. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Blair, this statement shows up Galloway for the murderous thug he is. Tony Blair was in the embarrassing position of deposing Saddam Hussein then having to sit back and watch as his own people hanged him. Not easy for a Labour administration who is rightly opposed to capital punishment, but an intervention would have undermined the sovereignty of Iraq's newly democratically elected government. Blair wanted Saddam tried for war crimes. Galloway just wants Blair dead.

Perhaps it's not surprising; Galloway was an old chum of the Ba'athists. A brief glimpse of his foaming, fire and brimstone speeches shows how he epitomises the 'any enemy of America is a friend of mine' dogma of the unthinking Left. An ideology that recognises only two extreme positions on an endlessly complex and constantly changing world is no better than the Bush administration's old 'With Us Or Against Us' nonsense. Even Bush has now toned down the bellicose rhetoric. Galloway hasn't.

A crudely dualistic weltanschung is okay for adolescents (I was a member of the Socialist Party Of Great Britain when I was twelve; it didn't last), but it's not okay for a careerist money-launderer who is paid from our pockets.

Maybe that's just a complicated way of saying:

Regarding the reflexive plasticity of the labour market / gay shower scene

2007-07-26T04:10:00.000-12:00

Our mate Steve recently had to put up with a work colleague's five minute rant about how all these Poles should be sent back to their own country and stop coming over here and stealing our jobs.

People see the job market as a zero-sum game. It's a common myth that one job position being taken results in one fewer jobs out of a finite number available. It's not true. Taking one position can create one or more other jobs.

Here's an example. You apply for a job but you get turned down, because you are manifestly an idle bastard and your C.V. is a work of baroque fiction. The job goes to someone else, who for the sake of argument, we shall say is Polish. The department she works for benefits greatly from her hard work, becoming more efficient and so the company decides to expand it, creating five new positions. Had a less dilligent worker filled the position, the company could have just slugged along as usual. The Polish worker just expanded the labour market. Try and be grateful.

This should be bloody obvious, but apparently not. Write it on a piece of paper and pin it on your co-workers face, Steve.

We are living in a climate of fear. People, to some extent understandably, fear what they don't know. Rapid societal change can be worrying for people. The fact is, Polish workers aren't claiming benefits. The UK labour market needs them. They are doing jobs that British born people don't want to do, or are not qualified to do. It reflects the fact that the government has left a whole generation of non-academically minded people untrained because they were rushed into university to do pointless degrees instead of learning a trade.

Last saturday night at Tony's house I watched Tango and Cash. Tango and Cash is the gayest film ever made. An execrable piece of buddy trash, it's hard to believe that the film makers weren't having a private giggle at goading the witless Sylvester Stallone into playing a flaming homosexual. Stallone is supposed to be the urbane, intellectual straight-man to Kurt Russel's bad boy maverick cop. Witness Stallone's odd, high-pitched accent as he battles with the limitations of his monotone voicebox. His lips move only for the words to flop out several seconds too late, like dead fish from a keep-net. They clearly overdubbed some of the more complicated bits. When I say this film is gay I mean it in the true sense. As Ruthless Reviews says, "Not only do Russell and Stallone shower together at one point, but they look at each other's cocks while naked. And then talk about each other's cocks. We see both of their asses for way too long. It is really inexplicable." I am glad I watched Tango and Cash. As one commentator on a torrent forum said, "It's a good film for people who like to drink in the daytime. I'm drunk right now".

Current reading

Gulag: A History - Anne Appelbaum
Britain BC - Francis Pryor
London: A Short History - A.N. Wilson
The Diversions Of Purley - Peter Ackroyd
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
Dark Water - Koji Suzuki

Vile

2007-07-13T04:59:00.000-12:00

Ladies and gentlemen, we have hit the modern art motherlode. If you are irritated by Banksy’s feeble pictorial metaphors and his tiresome band of metro-wank apologists, brace yourself for the poisonous Dash Snow.

This fawning hagiographic shit-stream comes courteousy of Ariel Levy, a New York Magazine hack.

Charlie Brooker said he wrapped up his TV Go Home site because television had become so absurdly dunder-headed that it was beyond parody. He cited as an example the show ‘Touch The Truck’, in which someone is rewarded for touching a truck for a lengthy period of time. When I first read about Dash Snow I thought it had to be the work of Brooker or Chris Morris. But no, it’s horribly real.

"The artist Dash Snow rammed a screwdriver into his buzzer the other day. He has no phone. He doesn’t use e-mail."

Bohemian.

"So now, if you want to speak to him, you have to go by his apartment on Bowery and yell up."

Edgy.

"Lorax-like, he won’t come to the window to let you see that he sees you: He has a periscope he puts up so he can check you out first."

Retro-eccentric!

"Partly, it comes from his graffiti days, this elusiveness, the recent adolescence the 25-year-old Snow spent tagging the city and dodging the police."

Dangerous. Straddling the line between crime and art!

“He’s pretty paranoid about lots of things in general, and some of it was dished out to him, but others he’s created himself,” says Snow’s friend, the 27-year-old artist Dan Colen, who—like so many of their friends—has made significant artistic contributions to the ever-expanding mythology of Dash Snow.

Enigmatic!

"Colen and Snow went to London together this fall for the Saatchi show in which they both had work. (Saatchi had bought one of Colen’s sculptures for $500,000.)"

Seal of approval!

"Saatchi got them a fancy hotel room on Piccadilly. They had to flee it in the middle of the night with their suitcases before it was discovered that they’d created one of their Hamster’s Nests, which they’ve done quite a few times before. To make a Hamster’s Nest, Snow and Colen shred up 30 to 50 phone books, yank around all the blankets and drapes, turn on the taps, take off their clothes, and do drugs—mushrooms, coke, ecstasy—until they feel like hamsters."

Wow. Wow. Ensuring underpaid hotel cleaners have a really hard day at work. Smearing your privileged foie-gras shit in the faces of the working class. That's so now... just so... so brave.

"McGinley was lying on the floor next to stacks of the New York Post and the Daily News with words and pictures cut out of them. “I’ve always been a big fan of the Post, and I remember in 1992, or whenever the fuck it was, Desert Storm, the Gulf War? Remember? I’d always read the Post, and there’d be really rad headlines about it,” said Snow. “I was just down for it! I’m down with anyone, even if they’re bad people, if they’re just, like, anti-American, you know what I mean? This is a series I’m working on,” he pointed at some collages on the wall with lots of pictures of Saddam Hussein, whose likeness is also tattooed on Snow’s arm. “They’re old headlines, and they all have come on them. Yeah, mine.”

I fought with this for hours. Am I giving this more time than it deserves? Isn’t it just spoilt kids fucking around in their trust-funded bubbles? Doesn’t it merit no more than a laconic dismissal?

No. No, no, no. The correct response is disgust. There is a moral duty to be outraged. This is art at its most decadent, ignorant and socially parasitical. It’s enough to turn me into a Trotskyist class warrior. Dash Snow, all his toadying friends and the wretched witch that wrote this should be sent to Abu Ghraib. They should be allowed to escape, just so they can be sent back again. Repeat until dead.

----------------------------------------------

Last night I had the dream that has been seared into the collective consciousness and troubled millions. I was in a plane that had been seized by terrorists. It was, inevitably, being flown into a building. I was preparing to be murdered. At my side was a glorious Islamic martyr, staring at me with a vicious pride. The last thing I wanted to see when I died was the triumphant face of a deluded idiot. So I looked at the building we were crashing towards and tried to think about architecture as I began to suffocate.

I hope it was Dash Snow's apartment.

Glastonhurst Gravenblog Report

2007-06-28T04:15:00.000-12:00

Before

The previous three nights I played solo shows supporting Charlotte Hatherley in Birmingham, Bristol and Exeter. In Birmingham the audience was seated; this sometimes creates an atmosphere of slightly forced, Jazz Club reverence. It is difficult to tell whether the audience likes you or whether they are just staring at you like dead fish because they can’t really move without making a spectacle of themselves.

We got there late and I didn’t have my usual two hours of drinking and practising time to prepare myself, but I think I pulled it off.

The set was thus:

Tunnels

Entertainment

Saints

Cities Beneath The Sea

Nicole

Bluebeard

Trust

The Diver

Black Holes In The Sand

The Bristol show was bizarre. I was playing in my home town to an audience who mainly didn’t know anything about me (that’s the idea behind support slots, I’m told), and were happy to talk over me. I was happy to talk back.

“I’d like to dedicate this next song to the guy at the back loudly discussing the decline of Ceefax. Dude, you are so right about Teletext. Complete also-rans. I’m just as passionate about this as you are”.

But the same guy talked all the way through Charlotte’s set, and then fawningly got her to sign a poster afterwards. He hadn’t come to listen, he had come there to talk about being there whilst he was there. How blissful it must be to truly live in the moment like that.

Charlotte performed as a two-piece with band mate Charlie, ignored the buffoons, commanded 95% of the crowd with her own new material then reeled off clever acoustic cover versions of Wire’s ‘Outdoor Miner’, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound’s ‘Kites’, and Kim Wylde’s ‘Kids In America’. The following night we played The Cavern in Exeter. It sounds like a cavern. The room was empty so I made some noise and some people came in. We had to leave immediately afterwards, so we missed Charlotte’s set that night. The place was rammed though, and I imagine it was a triumph.

Glastonbury

Friday

I reached the site at 9 am on Friday. After driving back from Exeter, my manager Michelle and I had been up until 3 am finishing the press release and biog for the new album. Even with special performers vehicle passes, laminates and wrist bands, it still took two hours, a couple of U-turns and some wildly conflicting directions from bewildered stewards to get to where the rest of the band had set up camp the night before. The wonderfully ordered chaos of Glastonbury is very egalitarian in that way. Artist, staff or punter, you will at some point find yourself deeply confused.

I reached my tent and tried to sleep. It was baking. Tranquilizers and Strongbow, woke up at 4pm. Drinking started immediately. As Charlie Brooker points out, for those of us who don’t count wading through rivers of mud and inhaling the gut-churning stench of shit amongst their hobbies, maintaining a constant, stable level of drunkenness is the best way to enjoy Glastonbury. Though this was nothing compared to what is currently happening up north.

Everyone but me was finding it relatively easy to remain upright. It turned out that my Wellingtons were in fact ‘deck boots’. These are flat bottomed and designed to provide suction on the wet wooden decks of sea vessels. Ignorant city boy. Then they split down the middle anyway, so I bought some boots from a fascist hippy (I assume he was a fascist, like thousands of other young rebels worldwide who hoist flags depicting the murderous totalitarian dictator Che Guevera)

Our first set of the festival was on the Late and Live tent, at 12 midnight. Though we were delighted to be invited to play, it was a bit of a bummer because it made it impossible for me to see Hot Chip and Bjork, two of the acts on the programme that I was most excited about. It also meant that at least 100,000 Gravenhurst fans had to miss Bjork and Hot Chip too, and piled into the 200 capacity Late and Live tent. Seriously, the massive crowds at the main stages were a crude CGI animation hastily contrived by the panicking BBC producers who hadn’t done their research.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and that guy Pete who won the last Big Brother was totally wigging out down the front. In our final track, a ten minute-long cover of The Kinks ‘See My Friends’, I closed my eyes, tilted my head back and had a private Spacemen 3 moment. Robin had extra ‘shape-space’ on the right-hand side of the stage, and the most adventurous shape he pulled made his fake moustache fall off.

The set was:

The Velvet Cell

She Dances (new one)

Hollow Men (new one)

Trust (new single coming out on 23^rd July)

Song From Under The Arches

See My Friends

My mum tells me Pete from Big Brother is friends with Ken Russell. I want to meet Ken Russell. I want him to make a pop video for us.

At some point that day, the BBC team managed to pick the wrong people for a vox pop. They crossed paths with my band mates Robin Allender and Alex Wilkins.

BBC person : “what’s been your favourite act so far?”

Robin: “umm… Amy Winehouse… I didn’t see her… I read her name in the programme… it was really good”

This was broadcast live, and presumably discarded for the edited ‘Best Bits’ coverage on BBC 2. I saw it on the ‘TV On Demand – Watch Again’ function. Someone may have uploaded it to you Tube, I’ll see if I can find a link.

After the show I took Drugs That Make Any Music Sound Good, and stayed up until 8 am. I don’t remember much of it.

Saturday

Eight years ago I found a coat in a club. It said ‘SPIEWAK’ on it and probably cost £300 as a result. It isn’t really waterproof, so I decided to go back to to the totalitarian-apologist and buy something more suitable. I chose unwisely; a £15 raincoat keeps the rain out but your own sweat in, so after a few minutes of slogging through mud you feel like a slug in a condom.

Around 4pm Ed Harcourt played The Park stage. Thankfully the rain eased off. Apparently, Ed hadn’t been to bed since Wednesday. I had spent some time with him the night before and he seemed, like me, Inclined Towards Having A Good Time. But Ed is a professional, and during the beautiful ‘Until Tomorrow Then’ the consummate showman climbed up onto the PA speakers and serenaded the crowd solo through an antique broadcast microphone.

At some point on Saturday I took Drugs That Make Anything Seem Like A Good Idea, and we hatched a plan for me to watch my label-mates Maximo Park (oh my boys… my boys…) from the side of the stage, then invade the stage, give Paul Smith a Morrissey fan-style hug and kiss and then run off, and presumably be ejected from the site, or possibly arrested. Naturally we didn’t have passes for the main stages and hospitality areas, but two security guards and two simple Jedi mind tricks later, we were at the heavily fortified Other Stage Artists and Crew entrance. At the last hurdle all I could play was the nepotism card. Fortunately, Maximo’s manager Colin probably thought he owed me a favour after kicking me out of their dressing room at Brixton Academy when he mistook me for a drug user. Maximo’s drummer Tom quickly explained ‘who I was’ and Colin was unnecessarily gracious and apologetic. He hadn’t realized ‘who I was’. I reassured him that I barely knew who I was.

So the security guard went to ask Colin, and a few minutes later I was about ten yards behind the band amongst a gaggle of screaming girlfriends and some quite important looking people. It was suggested that I push as far to the front of the backstage viewing area as possible, to perhaps be caught live on BBC TV, pale, twitching, and chewing my own face off. A girl got cross with me.

Girl: (shouting) “IF YOU ARE GOING TO STAND THERE YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!

Me: (shouting) : “WHAT?”

Girl (shouting) : “YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!”

Me (shouting): “I’M GOING TO POISON YOU LATER”

Girl (oblivious, shouting) : “YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!”

Me (shouting): “I KNOW, BUT I’M GOING TO POISON YOU LATER”

Girl (oblivious, shouting) : “JUST DANCE!”

I carried on doing what for me counts as dancing, and mercifully the Drugs That Make Anything Seem Like A Good Idea wore off and I ditched the extremely ill-advised stage-invasion plan. The crowd was going insane, Mr. Smith was totally in his element, and the band were properly rinsing it. They finished with ‘Going Missing’, which is my favourite track from ‘A Certain Trigger’. Looking at the BBC coverage, I was relieved to discover that I cannot be seen at the side of the stage.

After that I met up with my friend Sophie and brushed past a famous person -one of the blokes from Top Gear. On my way back to the tent I stopped off at a Portaloo. A sticker on the back wall read “THE OFFICIAL JO WHILEY TOILET’. I had a relatively early night; we had to get up to play The Park stage at 12.40 on Sunday.

Sunday

At around 12.40 it started raining quite hard, and then eased off at around 1.10, when we finished our set. Most of the audience thought they were going to be watching Adele, because that is what it said in the festival program. Something mysterious happened just after it went to press and we were asked to play the slot instead.

I told the audience who we were, quite a few times, in case we gave Adele a confusing reputation. I said something along the lines of

“Hello, we are Gravenhurst from Bristol. We are not Adele. We are Gravenhurst. After 72 hours on this festival site we are now operating at optimum performance levels, and improving all the time”.

The set was:

The Velvet Cell

She Dances

Hollow Men

Trust

Song From Under The Arches

Black Holes In The Sand

I’m not good at counting audiences when I am in the process of Rocking Out, but apparently about 300 people were watching. This was truly touching; It was really pissing it down. Crimean War Field Hospital with better tunes and more effective medicines.

That night was the absolute high-point of the festival for me. I saw the fabulous Circulus, a medievalist prog folk band. Fairport, Jethro Tull and Early Music = Wickerman, Lake and Palmer. Fantastic. They were the only band I saw that truly rocked. And they were the only band I saw who wore wizard’s robes and animal masks. Then I got pissed with Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt. Networking? Name dropping? Sue me. It’s nothing compared to brushing past that bloke from Top Gear.

After

Damp.

'Clive Burr was a better drummer than Nicko McBrain' - Discuss

2007-06-12T12:12:00.000-12:00

Maplin technician in not-pedantic shocker

I went into Maplin to buy a soldering iron. My flatmate's gas soldering iron melted itself. I asked the technician about the battery powered ones and he said 'For kids. Electrical is best, and it's cheaper'. When I told him the gas one had melted he said 'yes, bad design'. Then I asked him about a an S-VID to SCART lead and he recommended not buying theirs and showed me how to do it much cheaper using separate leads and drew three different diagrams for me. What a dude.

His name is Michal, he has lots of tattoos and is from Eastern Europe. Or he could be from France for all I know; these skilled, helpful migrants all look the same to me. If enough of them come here, they are in danger of wiping out the "Pffff....Nah mate, you won't get it... it's gonna be at least six to eight weeks for parts..." mentality that keeps our Nation strong, resourceful, efficient and welcoming to outsiders.

Ashton Court Festival

Very good news that Ashton Court Festival, Bristol's community festival will be going ahead. The extra costs incurred by the new licensing regulations, plus the ₤8,000 bill for graffiti damage and the ₤11,000 bill caused by people vandalising the estate, have left the festival owing over £100,000. As an independent and not for profit organisation they are entirely reliant on sponsorship and gate income to survive, so there is no margin for error. Find out more here.

I'm a little disappointed that the festival team rejected my specific strategy of wholeheartedly embracing corporate sponsorship whilst keeping Ashton Court essentially a community festival. By working closely with Imperial Tobacco, Bristol Community Festival could secure it's own future whilst giving the people of Bristol an opportunity to celebrate a key part of their city's rich economic heritage. But never mind.

The full line-up hasn't been announced yet but Gravenhurst are playing. I want Iron Maiden to headline. That's unlikely. Impossible, in fact. I've listened to Iron Maiden since I was eight. They got shit after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son though. People say Iron Maiden are silly. That's like saying a horse has hooves, and what sort of scoundrel would deny a horse his hooves?

The results of a rigorous two-week programme of lifestyle awareness

2007-06-07T08:39:00.000-12:00

Week one - moderate consumption of beer and wine

Read this month's Prospect magazine. Read the Economist. Read half of Nick Cohen's new book 'What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way'. Watched two Adam Curtis documentaries, 'Pandora's Box' and the 'The Mayfair Set'. Watched Andrew Marr's 'A History Of Modern Britain'. Finished mixing two songs. Achieved various administrative goals.

Week two - bag of weed, cider

Read half of Viz. Listened to Iron Maiden. Watched 'Conan The Barbarian', 'Commando', 'Death Wish', 'Death Wish II', 'Death Wish 3', 'Death Wish 4: The Crackdown', 'Death Wish V: The Face of Death' (boxed set), several episodes of 'Walker: Texas Ranger' (starring Chuck Norris, solid performances over several decades), 'Roadhouse' (starring Patrick Swayze, who knows full well that his crowning celluloid achievment was playing a nonce in Donnie Darko), 'American Psycho' (yet again), and all six episodes of 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' with the commentary on. Found myself idly searching Ebay for a copy of Michael Winner's last film, 'Parting Shots', starring Chris Rea. Thought about buying a bomber jacket with a picture of a panther on the back. Failed to achieve various administrative goals.

2007-05-10T13:51:00.000-12:00

You may know him as
Swearengen.
But to us he'll always be
Lovejoy

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy and Tinker get more than they bargained for when a routine evaluation goes awry. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)
8 PM Lovejoy When a routine evaluation goes awry, Lovejoy and Tinker get more than they bargained for. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy foils a gang of art thieves with the help of Tinker and his extraordinarily unlikely black lesbian wheelchair-bound sidekick. Lighthearted drama (Rpt)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy finds himself in the frame when a painting is stolen from an estate he is routinely evaluating. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy During a routine evaluation, Lovejoy beds a series of wealthy but increasingly hanging middle-aged women. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy's divvying skills are put to the test when a routine evaluation turns up a forgery. Or is it? Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Eric does something completely fucking dunderheaded, much to the wry amusement of Lovejoy and Tinker. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Loveable rogue Lovejoy lands himself in deep water when a routine evaluation takes an unusual turn. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)
8 PM Lovejoy Rough diamond antiques dealer Lovejoy finds more than he is looking for when a country estate is routinely evaluated. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

Cast List
Ian Mcshane as Lovejoy
Wrinkly old cow as Lady Jane Felsham
Dudley Sutton as Tinker
Chris Jury as Eric
Posh Bird as Beth
You don't really find her attractive do you? as Charlotte Cavendish (1993-94)
Really, she is pretty rough as Charles Gimbert

Production Details
Written by:
Ian La Frenais, Dick Clement, Terry Hodgkinson, Douglas Watkinson, Roger Marshall, Jeremy Paul, Others
Directed by:
John Crome, Ken Hannam, Baz Taylor, Others
Produced by:
Robert Banks Stewart, Emma Hayter, Colin Shindler, Jo Wright, Richard Everitt
6 series, 71 episodes
Transmitted: 1986-94
BBC Television
Witzend Productions
McShane Productions

With respect:

http://www.tinkerhasaposse.com

Political Correctness Gone Right

2007-04-27T04:27:00.000-12:00

Bristol City Council in correct decision shocker

This film is Shane Meadows's finest work to date. The notoriously inept Bristol City Council got it right; teenagers should see it, it's a powerful film, and cannily released on St. George's Day, it may coincide with a British National Party turnout in the local elections. Suffice to say it is unlikely BNP members will be off to their local art house cinema to see this. It is more important that their children see it.

http://warpfilms.com
http://www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk

Greetings from the new bottom of the same lake

2007-03-25T07:41:00.001-12:00

Here we are at our new blog address. Note the address bar- there you are. You can change your bookmarks accordingly. Good on you.

Our dedicated team of police divers have copied all the previous posts over to this new blog address. This means that if you want to read some old posts from this blog ("brimful of coruscating prose, wry asides, and many occurrences of the words 'fuck' and 'fucking'" - The Salisbury Review) you won't have to go to the old blog.

See you at the bottom of the lake.

Breakfast Lieutenant aka. Bad Club

2007-02-27T12:53:00.000-12:00

Click here for
"Now That's What I Call Deeply Harrowing! Volume. 1"
-an Amazon DVD list

Anton Maiof showed me how to play the IMDB Game. The rules are as follows:
Open IMDB. Only quiz master may see it. Choose and click on a film from Top Ten. Players have to guess, based on the film, a recommended film on that page. Winner stays on.

Legend has it that in the course of playing this game, Anton and friends were led from Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant to John Hughes's The Breakfast Club in only four recommendations. What happened next was explosive. It emerged that the two films had almost the same running time, of 96 and 97 minutes respectively. This meant that the two films could be shown concurrently, with the very real possibility that Emilio Estevez's pot-fuelled back-flips would coincide with Harvey Keitel sobbing, moaning and calling Jesus Christ a 'rat fuck'. Plans are under way to show the films together in a split screen format at the Cube Cinema in Bristol.

Funtimefunbreaktime

Guy N. Smith versus Garth Marenghi

The following quotes are from the works of Guy N. Smith and Garth Marenghi. Distinguish the parody from the parodied.

1 ) "Gordon would you … take me away from here? Take me with you, where there aren’t such things as wolves, Black Dogs and people cutting their heads off with saws".

2) "But what chance did they stand against this army of attacking pheasants?"

3) "She stared in horror as the blood poured from her open wound. Why had she opened that sarcophagus?? The sand turned a crimson red, the colour of blood. Her blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And bits of piss and shit. This was the worst day of her life."

4) "Why shouldn't a child's corpse turn into a pike? No reason at all...Maybe he was a fish and hadn't realised it up until now".

5) "It was his first taste of human flesh and he wondered why he had ever bothered with hares and sheep before".

6) "Something was pouring from his mouth. He examined his sleeve. Blood!? Blood. Crimson copper-smelling blood, his blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And bits of sick."

7) "This doomed girl had not only risen from her deathbed but she had turned into a nymphomaniac".

8) "He did something that caused the elephant to go berserk and the potato vendor to burn to death".

9) "Mike stared in disbelief as his hands fell off. From them protruded millions of maggots. Maggots!? Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. All over the post office floor, in Leytonstone."

10) "He whisked off her shoes and panties in one movement, wild like an enraged shark, his bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Mary's body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions: on top, doggy, and normal. Exhausted, they collapsed on to the recently extended sofa bed. Then, a hellbeast ate them."

11) "Nothing else mattered...Not even the giant crabs."

12) "'No way! No way on God's Green Land can a crab be bigger than a Renault Estate! Can it…!?!"

1) Guy N. Smith - Werewolf By Moonlight
2) Guy N. Smith - Carnivore
3) Garth Marenghi - title unknown
4) Guy N. Smith - The Undead
5) Guy N. Smith - Werewolf By Moonlight
6) Garth Marenghi - Slicer
7) Guy N. Smith - The Ressurected
8) Guy N. Smith - The Dark One
9) Garth Marenghi - title unknown
10) Garth Marenghi - Juggers
11) Guy N. Smith - Night Of The Crabs
12) Garth Marenghi - Crab!!

Like Garth Marenghi and Dean Learner, Guy N. Smith is a tireless campaigner for the re-introduction of the death penalty.

Burning witches brings people together

2007-01-10T07:16:00.000-12:00

New anti-discrimination laws dismissed in favour of world peace

Religious groups yesterday celebrated a new era of pluralism and tolerance after the House of Lords rejected new measures that would have outlawed the discrimination and harassment of gays.

Antique hatchets were buried and ancient rivalries dismissed as hitherto warring factions united against the common enemy of men who muck around with each other’s cocks. “The future of inter-faith religious tolerance and world peace lies in demonising queers” said Sheila Moustache, a Christian church group organiser.

Derek Fenton, a guest-house owner from Dorset expressed his relief at the axing of legislation that would have banned him from turning away monstrous shirt-lifters. “This is a triumph for tolerance, respect and common sense. My wife and I were unable to sleep knowing that the poo-thieves in the room next door might be ejaculating, deep, deep, into each other’s rectums. Decent folk have had enough of these minorities banging on about their ‘rights’. What about our rights? I cannot get that disgusting image out of my head, no matter what I do. I’m not even religious, and I still think they should be shot and then burned in hell”. Mr. Fenton was joined by fellow devout non-homosexual Abdul Rahman, a community leader who recently urged fellow Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jewish Zionists to campaign to shut down a house belonging to two men who lived together in it. The two men have since moved away from the area. “It’s amazing what can be achieved with respectful and sensitive inter-faith dialogue” said John Curry, a white supremacist Neo-Nazi convicted of a series of pub bombings in the early 90’s.

Dr.Ismail Haniyeh, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, oversaw a jubilant and light-hearted joint press conference in Gaza City alongside Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert and American Paleo-Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. “This is a momentous occasion” laughed Dr. Haniyeh. “Once we’ve turfed out all the buggers, there will be plenty of room in the Holy Land for Jews AND Muslims.” “And after that,” Buchanan joined in, “we can set to work on the Atheists. Once they’re gone, we can concentrate all our energies on space travel, and going to the Moon, and Mars, and other places in space”.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thought For the Day

The liberal elite cannot hide the fact that paedophiles are disguising themselves as Muslim women in veils in order to get access to children by working as classroom assistants. TRUST NO-ONE.

Neutral pig's head island

2006-12-31T01:50:00.000-12:00

“Those who say that fiction isn’t relevant any more should read Houllebecq – he is in a class of his own”
- Literary Review

That’s what’s written on the cover of the paperback edition of Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Possibility Of An Island’. The Post-Modernists argue that fiction isn’t relevant anymore, and the book world is listening fearfully. Brandishing Houllebecq, it lands a confident counter-strike…

No, of course the book world isn’t fucking listening; it’s a non-issue cooked up by a reanimated corpse-journalist, rotting but somehow still walking, who very likely hasn’t read the book, instead cobbling a review together by cribbing the press release, posing a few straw men and hitting the word count with a handful of desperate cliches. If blogging really is a public challenge to print journalism, and this is the standard we are up against, then it’s a pushover. In 1946 Orwell wrote ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’:

In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases—“a book that no one should miss”, “something memorable on every page”, “of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc etc”—will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go.

After sixty years of journalism little has changed. Indeed, it has probably got worse. Orwell, after all, is dead.

Avoid

“Quintessentially English”

“Achingly beautiful”

“…on acid”

“…on crack”

The decline of the pig’s head in butcher’s shop windows

In the past, when people were fully aware that what they were buying was a dead animal, the customer would check out the eyes for signs of decay. Milky? Sour complexion? Then it’s been hanging around too long. The trained consumer looked for signs of a healthy animal. At least, healthy until it was slaughtered. Nowadays, the consumer’s reaction to a disembodied pig’s head would be along the lines of “fucking hell! That’s a fucking pig’s head. Jesus, that’s revolting”, and they would promptly leave. The public want their food free range, organic, humanely reared and slaughtered, but they certainly don’t want anything resembling a dead animal.

Not Partisan

According to http://www.wordcounter.com/cgi-bin/politicalresult.cgi, this blog is, amazingly, politically neutral.

Damp food, bright lights, dead eyes

2006-12-14T13:45:00.000-12:00

The Organ, responsible for my favourite pop record of last year, have called it a day after five years, one album and a handful of EPs. They have admirably chosen to keep their reasons to themselves. A punishing schedule may have played a part in their disintegration; touring provides the musician with the classic bi-polar experience. In sympathy, I’m taking this opportunity to publish an excerpt from my last tour diary. It was nice to know you, ladies.

A snow-bound drive from Brugge to Toulouse. A service station. Damp food; bright lights, dead eyes. A notice guaranteeing a thrirty-minute toilet hygiene inspection. Above the cubicle, gaps in the styrofoam celing panels. Cameras, probably. You turn and your leg brushes against the bowl. You take part of it back to the van with you and leave part of yourself there. Now you know why the French shit in holes in the ground. The less contact the better. In/out as quickly as possible. Extract yourself from the dance before it tries to hold your hand.

A Holiday Inn south of Paris. Prison windows groan over a Legoland interzone. You open the door to your rabbit hutch and the rolling guff of a thousand lonely cigarettes swoops down your throat like a decaying pigeon searching madly for a quiet place to die. The bird surfs the slipstream of fruit-scented mustard gas; like hopeless medieval physicians pitching a poultice against a plague, the cleaning staff spray something into the air to combat the stench but for some reason choose to leave all the windows closed and turn up the radiators. Inside the apricot sweat-box the despair hangs in mid-air, blinking in the half-light. Nowhere to hide in the metal door, veneer walls and plastic curtains, it seeps quietly into the pores of its new friend. Pubic hairs on the carpet, semen grease-film on the T.V. remote, suicide-prevention half-windows. Push your face too deep into the pillow and last night’s smoker shares the bed with you. Switch off the metal wall heater and it will switch itself back on at 3 a.m. Baked lizards thrashing in the sheets. Wake up paddling in a diseased lung. The sweat beads can’t get past the plastic curtains. The cloud regroups in mid-air and you have made your contribution to a thriving, multiplying mass grave. You have become part of the room. You have made it that bit worse for the next guy.

love, love, love

All Tomorrow's Parents

2006-12-11T14:38:00.000-12:00

You'd have to be in a coma not to be feverishly aware that Britain is sick with feral adults who breed feral children to become feral adults. The Tories choose to point this out to us with reference to Victorian morality and homosexuals. I thought Cameron was paying public relations gurus to show the Tories how to aim away from their own feet. Steady... steady.. and jerk goes the knee!

***

All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Minehead this past weekend had a running theme: your parents' band is better than yours. Thurston Moore curated the line up, consisting chiefly of bands signed to his Ecstatic Peace label. Many of them were boring. The weekend was rescued by the indie rock elder statesmen: Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Melvins, Gang of Four, and The Stooges. It shouldn't have needed to be.

Too many noise guitar bands were hiding behind noise instead of using it. I don't want to see an experiment, I want a carefully prepared demonstration. I want you to crack my skull open. I want this

terrorists/hot women

2006-12-05T02:04:00.000-12:00

The correct response to a terrorist attack in London

The United Kingdom has an estimated population of 60 million. Of these, 14 million people live in the London metropolitan area. 60 percent of these are aged between 18 and 60.

Roughly half of these are women. According to Gaussian distribution, 50 percent will be judged as average looking, 30 percent as above or below average, 10 percent will be a bit rough, and 10 percent will be pretty hot. This means that approximately 420,000 women in London are by any reasonable measure, pretty hot. This gives us a city the size of Bristol entirely populated by hot women. Who's winning now, terrorists? Hah.

n.b the term 'men' may be substituted for 'women'

Current listening: 'Asceticists' - Whitehouse

"I'm a terrible babysitter. i've got your child in the shower" - early draft lyric for 'Bad Babysitter' by Princess Superstar

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you

2006-11-25T05:58:00.000-12:00

Weather
The weather this week: cramped, dismal and Russian. It serves to remind one of why the English are quite so wretched.

Boring man
Last week I met a very boring man. I was trapped in his company for about an hour, perhaps longer. It was enough time for me to appreciate a distinction between the boring and the merely dull. Dull people are without merit. They lack qualities. Boring people are different; they actively engage you in conversation, and suck you into their tedious world of anecdotes and solipsistic pomposity. They are wasting your time. They are standing too fucking close. If you insult them they don't notice, which is enraging. You want to kill them but they will not die. They simply will not die. My friend was mugged and the boring man immediately told her in great detail of the time one of his friends was mugged, as though as it were a competition. Boring people are intensely competitive. Likewise, intensely competitive people are boring. Sometimes the world is simple, but that doesn't make it any easier.

Eva Green
I had Bond Girl Eva Green tipped for stardom after five minutes of dirty old Bertolluci's bi-curious arthouse skinflick The Dreamers.

Cigarettes
There are two types of cigarette and they are both Class A Cigarettes. The first is your standard filter-tipped wincer at around £5.50 a pack. Camel, Marlboro and Lucky Strike are favoured by the young and trendy, who think that Rothmans are a bit working-class. The second type is smoked by older people who are in the know. This cigarette is longer, cheaper, comes in packs of 25 and has an aristocratic name, such as Mayfair and Regal. Those attracted to an elitist, clubroom, invitation-only aesthetic may enjoy the smooth taste of John Player Special. The packaging is often exquisitely gaudy, with gold trim and bevelled edges. Some of these brands are menthol flavoured. All these cigarettes taste and smell disgusting and no-one would smoke them if they weren't highly addictive. They are sprayed with chemicals so that each cigarette burns itself out, ensuring you light another if you forget to smoke continuously. Remember, they are both Class A cigarettes made from a careful blend of only the very finest Virginian and Domestic tobbacos. I have a Craven 'A' tin from the 1920's. On the inside lid reads the legend 'These cigarettes are specially formulated to prevent sore throats'. The fact that companies are no longer allowed to lie to us so brazenly means people think that they might now be telling the truth. Let them lie to us again; let them weave colourful webs of ludicrous deceit; then it will be obvious that they aren't to be trusted.

like, one day I was in Lidl innit

2006-11-15T01:50:00.000-12:00

Penetrating social commentary, wryly minimalist video

"yeah
a/b
(indecipherable)
volume 1
alright then

let me tell you about a little trip I had, innit
like, one day I was in Lidl innit
and this is how it went
check it
one day I went to Lidl
I went to shoplift in Lidl
then I got caught in Lidl
now I don't go back to Lidl
one day I went to Asda
I went to shoplift in Asda
then I got caught in Asda
now I don't go back to Asda"

I am also enjoying this immensely

Ultraskull Presents: News summary in animated Gifs

2006-11-09T14:40:00.000-12:00

Democrats

Republicans

----------------------------

A great week for American women
Kira Cochrane - The Guardian

"...Nancy Pelosi's historic election to Speaker of the House, the third-highest position in US
politics and the most significant ever held by a woman (if George Bush and Dick Cheney were
to die, Pelosi would become president)...For the first time in US history, not one, but two
women represent the most visible, and probably the most powerful politicians in a single party.
Hillary Clinton's landslide victory in New York, where she captured 67% of the vote, has
naturally been seen as another positive step on her now apparently unstoppable journey
towards a candidacy in the 2008 presidential elections..."

Rumsfeld: "I am human and I need to be loved"

2006-11-08T13:15:00.000-12:00

In his resignation speech, a visibly shaken Donald Rumsfeld asked the media 'How can you say I go about things the wrong way? I am human and I need to be loved'. Responding to questions regarding his handling of the war in Iraq, he became impatient and truculent, proclaiming 'I crack the whip and you skip, but you deserve it. You deserve it, deserve it, deserve it.' Asked whether his resignation signalled the beginning of the end for the Bush administration, Rumsfeld responded enigmatically 'There is a light that never goes out'. When asked whether he had any regrets, he paused briefly, then said "No more apologies. no more apologies. I'm too tired. I'm too sick and tired and I'm feeling very sick and ill today". As he left the stage he muttered 'My life is a succession of people saying goodbye ...'. His speechwriter was unavailable for comment.

Poor Donald. Not a good time for him. Let's give him a treat. Let's take him surfing. 'Waterboarding' sounds like fun. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. Isn't it like when social workers take groups of 'problem children' on expensive adventure holidays to encourage team building? Come on, Rummy! Let's hit some primo swells, check out some honeys and shoot the shit about all that totally bogus Jihad gig. Woah! Wipeout! So where's that Bin Laden dude? He was rippin' it last week.

No, hold on, wasn't that Cheney that was into surfing? I'm lost.

"He's a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that." - Richard Nixon on Donald Rumsfeld

You're fucked

2006-11-07T15:22:00.000-12:00

This is your mum:

and this is your son:

Give up. Give up now.

This could go on forever, in which case I’m doomed.

2006-11-06T14:08:00.000-12:00

Like Dennis Nielsen, I drink myself into an unsleepable trance and listen to music very loud on headphones when most sane people are safe in their beds. Unlike Dennis Nielsen I don’t have a dog named Bleep, and I don’t have any dead men buried beneath my floorboards. Like Dennis Nielsen, I do like ‘Oh Superman’ by Laurie Anderson, I stand slightly left of centre, I am scared of being alone, I lack self control and I have made some poor decisions. But I don’t like Tubular Bells, so I think the comparisons end there. Dear God I hope they end there. Right now it’s ‘Speedway’ by Morrissey. It was the same in 1994. Nothing has changed. The song and my response remains the same. Your record collections may be the only constant. Unlike your friends, you can’t wear them out. They don’t get exhausted by your constant neediness. You don’t have to appeal to them, you don’t have to change to win them over, you don’t have to do anything for them. They are there for you, unreservedly. They never spurn you, they never reject you. They never lead you on, whether innocently, deceptively, naively or ambiguously. Just hit play and the therapy resumes free of charge. They are your friends. Hold on to your friends.

I have a thorn in my side and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. A dear friend said it might be the artist’s lot to suffer for their art. I hope that isn’t true. If it goes on forever, I am doomed. I was touched to find out that someone quoted me once. I’d like to say that now my heart is full, but it just ain’t.

I just got back in touch with an old friend; a friend who has an inner strength I can only dream of. This old friend has it worse than me; and I wonder whether this is the key. Perhaps you get to a certain point where you simply must cope; you don’t have the luxury of limbo. Sister you’re a poet. Sister, you are a survivor. Good night and thankyou.

It's not right, but it's not wrong

2006-11-06T10:27:00.000-12:00

I just invented a new cocktail. It's called a Gin Giblet. Take four parts of the roughest gin you have lying around, in this case, the only gin you have lying around, Tesco Value Gin. If you don't have gin, use the 80% abv. Polish grain spirit you bought as a 'joke', or failing that, the 90% abv. Irish Poteen you bought to poison cats with. Mix it with two parts five year old lime cordial you will find at the back of the kitchen cupboard. You may have to wrestle with it. It's stuck to a bottle of salad cream that should have been binned years ago along with the cordial. You don't have any tonic water, so don't bother looking for any, just top up the mixture with tap water. You won't find any ice, because you don't think ahead, and there aren't any lemons to garnish it with because if you had fruit lying around this would indicate a healthy lifestyle, in which case you wouldn't be in the state you are in now. Swallow it very fast, pour yourself another and have a good think about bathing face down. When it reaches your guts, drink some more so you can't feel what it is doing to your guts. You are now stinking drunk. Smoke some cigarettes. Do something you will later regret, then collapse. Wake up somewhere, then repeat as necessary.

The album is nearly finished. Maybe it will sell enough copies for me to be able to afford some more Poteen.

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"...

2006-11-01T05:38:00.000-12:00

... John Lydon asked from the Winterland stage at the end of the Sex Pistols' last concert.

Ever ruined a favourite record? It's easily done. Vulnerable times. You play the songs that made you cry. The songs that saved your life. The songs that make sense of the senseless. You go back a long way, you and those songs. They've seen you through some bad times, those songs. Wise words and waveforms etched onto vinyl, handled with care, will last you a lifetime. Then the world you were grappling with, the world you thought you had just about got a handle on, a world you didn't fully understand but at the very least thought you recognised, turns out to be something completely different. You didn't see the signs. You didn't notice the clues. A shapeshifter. The soundtrack to the carnival is sullied forever; someone poisoned the well and waited a while before telling the villagers. The band played on as one by one they fell to the floor. It gets worse: you shared the songs, passed them back and forth. All those words: all messages on an ill wind. An interloper speaking Your Private Language in Your Private Inner World. The Trojans must have had trust issues for years afterwards. The soldiers emerged from the horse, the city was in a drunken stupor. Never let your guard down. You'll be truly disappointed.

You can't just sit there moping. You must get out for a while. You pay a few quid to see the Turner Prize nominations. You could have bought a hotdog instead. But you didn't. You paid to see the work of a new generation of artists at the cutting edge of popular culture. How you longed for that hotdog, all forlorn on that hotplate. While you were looking at some stuff in some rooms, someone else got that hotdog. The hotdog you were so close to having and holding. That hotdog with your name on it. Your hotdog. Still, as you walk on, hungry, dispirited and wondering if you will ever again be able to trust your own appetites, you have to say to yourself: it's only a fucking hotdog.

Verhoevenfest 2006

2006-10-26T07:36:00.000-12:00

The largely spiritless British public seems to need some kind of austere paternal authority to enforce the soul-cleansing cycle of sin, guilt and contrition that the fear of God once provided. This new authority is the institution of Health Terrorism; a continual media barrage of bewildering medical statistics, nutritional guidelines and fitness recommendations that leaves citizens in a twenty-four hour state of Lovecraftian lurking fear. Don't even THINK about enjoying life today unless you have eaten at least five portions of fruit and vegetables. What's that carefree fucker over there hiding? Must be hiding something. No-one can be fulfilled unless they obey a strict discipline of alternately mirthless, smug and anxiety-ridden lifestyle masochism. Health experts have a monopoly on the good life. Fitness is the only virtue. Live longer, or regret it later. Never mind lying awake at night terrified of cancer caused by leaving televisions on standby. Those oranges you bought aren't even the right kind. You think you are getting the nutrients you are told you need BUT YOU ARE NOT, AS IT TURNS OUT, YOU FOOL. Did you not read the latest reports? GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND, MORON. And what are you so stressed about? Do you not know that stress will kill you? WRITE IT TWENTY FIVE TIMES ON YOUR FUCKING FOREHEAD: STRESS WILL KILL ME. Don't even THINK about going to sleep tonight until you have fully comprehended the fact that your are GOING TO DIE FROM STRESS. Oh, and women: you will always be fat and there is FUCK ALL you can do about it. And, as it turns out, your home is absolutely filthy, and your wardrobe is so HOPELESS IT ISN'T EVEN FUNNY. YOU ARE A FUCKING DISGRACE.

Last weekend some friends and I celebrated Verhoevenfest 2006. Robocop: The Directors cut; Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls. Afterwards I lay down in the dark and listened to shortwave radio test transmissions. A series of soothing, meaningless tones and callsigns passed through me as I sank slowly into the floor, down through the shop below and deep into the earth, and then, when it all went a bit Lair of the White Worm, I thought: life is good.

religions don't deserve special treatment

slap my hand

2006-10-11T06:29:00.000-12:00

Just a bad penny
I always come back to you
Should have known you couldn't trust me
As far as you could throw me

This link may die soon - when someone tried to upload more Big Black it was rejected. Apparently You Tube would not approve it. It has a rude word in it.

I don’t have any skin

2006-10-02T01:39:00.000-12:00

Rotterdam

We had been drinking for hours. An impromptu speech by a film maker prevented us from setting up on time, and we were told we had an unrealistic five minutes to prepare ourselves. Before I even had my guitar out of it’s case the stage manager (hereon to be referred to as ‘Mr. Gitboy’) told me that we “really must start now because we are already running seriously behind”. We had been waiting around for seven hours for them to get their shit together. If we are rushed, we fuck things up. After many years and something approaching a hundred gigs, we are not prepared to be rushed. As I casually plugged in and tuned up, Mr. Gitboy barked at Michelle “he could have done that ages ago!!!!”. Dave was seriously pissed off, which always improves his playing. We were completely unhinged. I nearly fell over. I hit The Zone. It was most satisfying, even though there was a continual, piercing feedback from my monitors which made my brain cry even though I wear earplugs. After See My Friends I asked the audience if there was time for one more, aware that the Mr. Gitboy was giving himself an aneurysm. The audience shouted back “YES!!!!”. Righteous. We played a very long version of Black Holes in the Sand. While I was fucking about with my pedals at the end of the song, Mr. Gitboy gave Huw the evils and made that cut-throat gesture they make when they really, really want you to stop and piss off. Huw continued at a particularly casual pace. At the end of the set Dave looked like he had been swimming with his clothes on.

While I was packing away a man came up to me.

Man (adopt Dutch accent): That was very good. But where is the girl?

Me: The girl?

Man: Yes. On the last song, on Black Holes in the Sand, where is the girl who sings on the record?

Me: er… there isn’t a girl singing on the record. It’s me.

Man: It didn’t sound like the record.

Me: It was supposed to…

So that was embarrassing.

Mr. Gitboy aside, the promoters and the volunteers running the show were absolutely wonderful and unnecesarily courteous. After us, Hot Club de Paris played their fast, Scally-bantering math-rock pop nuggets, as tight as a UK promoter’s purse-strings. I was distracted by a monstrously tall Dutch woman. She was taller than Dave (six foot seven). She was wearing superfluous high heels, as though she had looked in the mirror that evening and thought “Hmm. I'm definitely not tall enough. Tonight I will be taller”. Entranced, I didn’t know whether to bolt out of the room in terror or sit down in a comfy chair and light a cigar.

Flight back home: fucking choppy. I’ve never experienced that kind of thing before even though I’ve flown a lot more than an environment-conscious liberal like myself can probably justify*. Rollercoaster stomach; waiting for the captain to tell us we can phone our loved ones. Half the passengers suddenly find God. I think bugger, I haven’t finished the album yet, but at least the world is just as random as I’ve always believed. I’m as insignificant as the grotesquely obese man taking up three seats in the row behind me, but we are both more privileged than the infinite people who will never actually be born. So God: you and I haven’t ever really got along. For a start, you don’t even have the common decency to exist, so what the bloody hell do you expect me to do? Go away and learn some manners and perhaps then we can have a mature discussion about my impending death.

*What exactly is a ‘hand-wringing liberal’? I don’t even know how to wring my hands. How do you do it? Is it fun?

and they catch him, and they say he's mental

2006-09-29T08:40:00.000-12:00

I am making an album. I am enjoying making an album. But I ask myself, will it really belong on a record store shelf alongside Loveless? Seventeen Seconds? Strangeways Here We Come? Vauxhall and I? Copper Blue? Playing With Fire? Liege and Lief? If this record gets lost in a record store and wanders into the ranks of the above, won't it get it's coat and quietly shuffle out? When you make a record you have to ignore this worry. You leave it up to the journalists. Then you disagree with them on principle. How strange. There's an essay in there somewhere. If you want to hear more, I'll be in the bar with my head on the bar.

It might be worth spending a tenner on. The artwork will be nice. It won't be as good as this though:

Growling for dog food

2006-09-27T04:02:00.000-12:00

Today's listening pleasure has been provided by the Tony Mansell Singers

On saturday we are playing a show in Rotterdam, whose startling modern architecture includes this and this. Rotterdam was bombed to pieces in the second world war by these in these. Until recently it was the world's busiest port; it is now the biggest port in Europe and the seventh biggest in the world. Unlike Amsterdam, there thankfully aren't too many of (brace yourself) these (sorry about that) though there are still a few of these that hopefully don't look as as bad as this or this.

But we won't see any of it because we will only be there for one night.

it's the turnstiles that make us hostile

2006-09-25T06:01:00.000-12:00

Tune for the Day: 'Love Theme From Prisoner: Cell Block H' - William Motzing Orchestra

Thought for the Day

This morning, some kids down the road were playing footie with a severed head and it made me think: we must reclaim the George Cross from the England football team. For too long our national flag of St. George, Mighty Dragon Slayer and Palestinian Patron Saint of England has been appropriated by the dark forces of competent sportsmanship compromised by weak management and flagging team spirit.

I will not change and I will not be nice

2006-09-24T03:09:00.000-12:00

You're just so busy busy busy busy . Take a break and test your knowledge with the random Smiths lyric generator. It's brash, it's outrageous and it's free. Unfortunately it doesn't include any of Morrissey's solo work. I was hoping it would generate 'new' material based on a pool of idiosyncratic words and structures, like this Guided By Voices song title generator. Generating Guided By Voices-style material presents a far lesser challenge as Robert Pollard's lyrics are meaningless. The closest we can get to a Morrissey lyric generator is the famous Alanis Morrissette lyric generator.

For the truly lost, here is the apathetic online journal entry generator

A random Gravenhurst lyric generator would be most welcome. It would make my life a lot simpler.

What's the secret, Max?

2006-09-18T02:56:00.000-12:00

Fred West decided what he was going to do several months before he did it. He took small strips from the bedclothes each day and nobody noticed. The rope got longer and longer and nobody noticed. Fred carried on being his jocular self. He effortlessly charmed the prison officers. Fred was on 24 hour suicide watch. He was supposed to be checked every fifteen minutes. Fred reckoned that New Year's Day celebrations would disrupt the routine. He seized his chance.

The skilled predator knows the importance of patience. It watches carefully and silently for the right time to pounce. The human predator enjoys a sense of intellectual superiority in outwitting its prey. It knows patience will reward it twiceover. It will gorge itself on the prize and gorge itself on winning it.

How do you learn patience when you are not a predator? How do you learn patience when you are trying to minimise harm? How do you know whether you made the right move at the right time? You cannot 'win'. There is nothing to feed on. There's no prize.

"A couple of drunken nights rolling on the floor
Is just the kind of mess I'm looking for.
I'm gonna dream 'till Monday comes in sight
I want to see the bright lights tonight

Meet me at the station don't be late
I need to spend some money and it just won't wait
Take me to the dance and hold me tight
I want to see the bright lights tonight"

message on an ill wind

2006-09-15T12:37:00.000-12:00

Current listening: have a guess

An interviewer in

France

asked me "is being ironical a way of life for you?". I guess she expected me to personify my lyrics, but business and pleasure... She was truly disappointed. I don't like to disappoint, so I'll have a bash at documenting, in real time, my uncensored, incoherent thought processes.

Ok Mr. Scientist- explain this: a time machine would totally rule right now. No new mail! There's always Google News if you're looking for something to read. The glass is empty but why not repeatedly turn it upside down anyway? No new mail! The sum total of all your problems will show in your Quick Contacts depending on how often you email them to your friends. It is Magic! >Undo. There's always a Google Feelings and Opinions Generator if you're looking for someone to be. No conversations in the Wastebasket. Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 megabytes of memories?! (memories that need to be temporarily Trashed will be automatically deleted after 180 days but you can UNDELETE). Do you really think those last words will change if you read them again? Buy now or wait for improved credit score? Remember, absolutely disastrous emotional policies can lead to psychological stagflation!! Wait! Don't wait! >Undo. Your heart may be repossesed if you do not keep up repayments. Well stop playing with it, son, and it will probably go away. A time machine would totally rule right now. >If you have no desires, and then you have no desires to be thwarted, but the person underneath where does he go? He knows I'd love to see him. No new mail! How truly disappointing. Young girl, one day you will be old but the thing is, if I stop playing with it, it might go away. Do I really think those last words will change if I read them again? There's always a Google Feelings and Opinions Generator if you're looking for someone to be. Fuck! I've drank too much and I've said too much and there's nowhere to go but the inbox. There's always Google News if you're looking for something to read. But essentially I am an optimist. In the end, all the baddies died and he got the girl.

Not fun. Check out previous or later posts for something more entertaining.

Judge Reinhold, yesterday

Kevin Shields , yesterday

(Sorry Kevin)

I'll have you, I will

2006-09-14T07:29:00.000-12:00

BBC 6 Music tent at Summer Sundae Festival

Not clear what is going on here.
Caption suggestions welcome.

Gideon Coe: you fuckin' watch it son or i'll clip you with this umbrella and smash that fuckin' Fosters can down your shittin' two-bit indie loser throat*

*Mr. Coe is a respected broadcaster. He would never utter such inappropriate language on air or in private conversation. He is a scholar and a gentleman and the very suggestion that he would indulge in this kind of behaviour is a disgusting slur against a man whose conduct and reputation are beyond reproach. Actually I think we were discussing our mutual love of Red House Painters.

Thanks to Sophie Harris for the photo.

kill yr idols

2006-09-11T03:46:00.000-12:00

Many of my favourite bands (Wire, Joy Division) are considered post-punk, but I don't believe that punk was as important as many rock historians say it was. It’s received wisdom that punk represented a profound musical revolution, but most noisy guitar bands could learn everything they need to know from The Velvet Underground and the Kinks. The Smiths, Red House Painters, The Handsome Family, Broadcast… it’s not immediately obvious that punk has any relevance to these bands at all.

(ducks and runs for cover)

Somebody left the door open and the wrong dogs came home

2006-09-07T05:09:00.000-12:00

I just made this Iraqi border town Airfix model

I was in a hobby shop off Denmark Street in London with my friend Pete. I was approached by that bloke from Channel Four News who asked me if I would mind being interviewed on camera about the Airfix company going bust. I agreed. This much was straightforward.

Bloke: So how long have you been making Airfix Models?
Me: About two weeks.
Bloke: .....Okay....and what attracts you to them?
Me: I'm a musician and making music is killing my life so I've started revisiting a childhood I never actually had. I like the idea of having a world that I CAN COMPLETELY CONTROL. (This last sentence was the only bit they broadcast, making me look like a social retard)
Bloke: So why do you think that kids today aren't interested in making models?
Me: They are too into computer games. And drugs.
Bloke: (looks at assistant, looks back at me) . Urr... we can't use that really.
Me: But it's true.
Bloke: Yes, but we'd have to consult our solicitor.
Me: Well okay. Kids can't relate to wars that happened over sixty years ago. Most of the people in this shop are old men. If you go into Forbidden Planet you'll see that they sell loads of pre-made scale models of characters from movies. If Airfix had aggressively pursued contracts with major studios for, say, Batman figurines you can actually build and paint yourself, they may not have gone bust. They haven't moved with the times. They should have employed me as their marketing manager.

That was it. They didn't broadcast the two sensible things I said.

**********************************************************
Things to do on boring journeys
By train: Find a nearly empty carriage. Approach someone who is sitting alone by the window at a four berth table, point at the seat right next to them and ask 'is anyone sitting here?'. Before they can work out how to respond, sit down next to them, spread a broadsheet newspaper across the table then promptly fall asleep.
By coach: At regular intervals, crawl down the gangway, rest your head on the driver's shoulder and ask "are we there yet?".
By taxi: Many taxi drivers make tiresome small talk for the duration of the journey. Disarm them by talking excitedly about your new wallpaper. Phrase your witless meanderings as though they are questions. If the driver attempts to change the subject, run with it for about twenty seconds then elegantly steer it back on course.
By plane: These days, security regulations are used to excuse miserable, sour faced service and deeply humiliating immigration procedures. If you so much as look slightly wrong this can be used as a reason to deny you boarding. As such, there is little scope for stupid behaviour on air travel. Pretty much anything but blind obediance is seen as insubordination. If you really want to push it, you can keep asking the air stewards if there is anything you can do to help, praise the quality of the food and try to strike up a conversation with them when they end the flight with the traditional but clearly anachronistic individual farewells.
By ferry: There is fuck all of interest on ferrys, and little you can do about it. But outside, what can you see? Waves, sky. Oh, but look down, look down. Swirling black nightmare drowning downwards forever and ever those railings could simply give way at any time no-one will even notice you've disappeared for at least an hour oh my God this is actually happening. Meanwhile, indoors: greasy food, fruit machines and the smell of dusty vomit-caked carpets. Disco disco disco disco disco. Find a cabin and drink yourself into a coma. If you venture out of your cabin at night you are likely to be intimidated by gangs of drunken fat neck Brits on the piss. If approached, pretend to be retarded, show them your scale model of the ferry, tell them the Captain gave it to you and play with it on the carpet.

**********

DAXX: Total C****

2006-08-23T01:20:00.000-12:00

Today I experienced the most baffling and insulting interaction of my entire life. I wanted a USB lead for my mobile phone which would enable me to download photos to my PC. The thoroughly nice Vodaphone shop chaps suggested I go to a shop in the Galleries in Bristol called 'DAXX'. I went to the shop, walked in and there were two men behind the counter. I spoke first with the younger guy. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hi, do you have a USB lead for one of these phones so I can download stuff onto my PC? Vodaphone suggested I try you guys.
Younger bloke: what is it.
Me: (I show him the phone ) it's a Nokia ( I show him the connection on the phone)
Younger bloke : (grunts and taps stuff into a computer). No we haven't go it
Me: Oh, okay. Any recommendations where i might get one?
Younger bloke: No.
Older bloke: You won't get one. If we ain't got it you won't get it.
(meanwhile younger bloke leaves shop)
Me: Er.. so if you don't have it then i won't get one... in the whole of Britain?
Older bloke: You're being a cunt, get out of my shop
Me: (baffled) ...I was only trying to clarify whether there were any available, anywhere
Older bloke: You are being smart, just get out
Me: I really don't understand.
Older bloke: Oh, yeah well, i've got a university education and i'm smart, fuck off
Me: um..well thanks for calling me a cunt. That's great. have a nice day. (I leave the shop)

Baffling. These people are trying to run a business. It is clearly not a retail chain. They specialise in unlocking phones and supplying phone accesories.

I suggest you repeatedly phone them and ask them for a USB lead for a Nokia phone.

DAXX COMMUNICATIONS

17A ST. NICHOLAS STREET
BRISTOL BS1 1UA

Classified Directory

0117 929 1590

Furious, Tonbridge Wells

2006-08-20T03:10:00.000-12:00

Yesterday I packed my rucksack with hair gel, an aerosol can, matches, a stopwatch and a copy of the Koran with demented scriblings in the margins and various pages ripped out, and boarded a London bound 737 at Helsinki airport. Unbelievably, I managed to get through security with these items. This is just another example of one rule for the terrorists and another for the public.

terrorism rescues earth from environmental catastrophe

2006-08-11T01:45:00.000-12:00

Heathrow: Terrorists attempt to blow up planes by mixing liquids. Water banned on planes.
Problem: body made up of 75% water.

Result: human beings banned from planes.

Victory for the Environmental Lobby! The end of air travel!!!! Earth saved!

Thanks, Islamists! We owe you one!

left the house, returned

2006-07-31T21:22:00.000-12:00

Not much going on here, busy recording a new album, playing some festivals, writing this, reading this, this, this, this, and this, and playing with this on the carpet.

New look Gravenhurst website by Dave

Playlist - copy it and be inside my ears

the butterfly collector – ARkane

dress up in you – Belle & Sebastian

snowstorm – Galaxie 500

red sleeping beauty – McCarthy

wendell gee –- REM

has he got a friend for me? – Richard and Linda Thompson

the light that will cease to fail – Stereolab

le parc (theme from Streethawk) – Tangerine Dream

brother XII – War Against Sleep

papua new guinea – Future Sound of London

little black egg – the Nightcrawlers

perfume garden – The Chameleons

o.d. catastrophe – Spacemen 3

f** s* * * ****

2006-06-10T13:53:00.000-12:00

two things:

HOT CHIP

is the best thing a major label has signed in living fucking memory?

THE VIBRATION

Their album is out now. Allison Veronica the drummer is so cool she even got in industry session drummer slagazine Rhythm.

ULTRASKULL issue two is out now and don't read it at work

Don't Hassle the Hoff

an award ceremony where everyone wins a f***

2006-06-01T02:22:00.000-12:00

Special post to draw attention the new Geisha album via their myspace site:

http://www.myspace.com/geishanoiseresearchgroup

"Hello, you have made the wise choice of viewing the profile of the noise group Geisha, who live in Bristol. We began like many groups out of boredom and sheer hatred of what was around us, not to save music, but to destroy it through an ever inreasing number of FX units.

People often ask me what the words are about, I usually make things up, but if you must know, its mainly about people being eaten, the many different and varied ways one might have sex with another person and the mish-mash of a hundred Jess Franco movie plots."

Band Members	Anton Maiof - Voice, Guitar, Electronics / Steve James - Bass / Sean Talbot - Percussion
Influences	Gyorgy Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis and Parliment.
Sounds Like	An award ceremony where everybody wins a fuck.

Mondo Dell'orrore LP (Blood Red Sounds / SuperFi Records / Crucial Blast (USA))

CDs are available RIGHT FUCKING NOW for sale via
www.bloodredsounds.co.uk
and in the US of A at
www.crucialblast.net

And, for a sharp contrast, here is Belle & Sebastian performing their superb forthcoming single on Scottish TV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouB_FEj8Mg4

ULTRASKULL ISSUE TWO OUT NOW

meanwhile

2006-05-27T09:48:00.000-12:00

Currently listening to
Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Scott Walker - The Drift
Magnetophone - remixes, demos, b-sides and rarities

Currently working on Ultraskull issue two

____________

Tom's weblog has a discussion regarding the Da Vinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum. I was rather pleased with my contribution, so I am reprinting it here for the purposes of continued self-pleasuring:

I tried to read 'Foucault's Pendulum'. I had to stop ten pages in with the tacit admission that Umberto Eco is too clever for me. With the Da Vinci Code I had the pleasure of stopping after ten pages, confident that Dan Brown is too stupid for me.

ULTRASKULL COMIC ONLINE

2006-04-27T02:07:00.000-12:00

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/ultraskull/

A new web comic from us Silent Age Records people.

WARNING - POTENTIALLY OFFENSIVE CONTENT

cover illustration by Will Schaff

Joan sez

2006-03-16T00:07:00.000-12:00

Mood: Joan Ferguson
Music: Joan Ferguson
Quote of the Day: "You're on report" - Joan Ferguson

Joan sez get with the fackin' programme you bouffant-haired industry pole-smokers

urrr

2006-03-15T08:30:00.000-12:00

When it comes to pulp horror novels that fail to live up to the promises of their lurid cover art, we have some catching up to do. These guys put out the French translations of our favourite trash auteur, Garth Marenghi, sorry, I mean, Shaun Hutson.

(You can see the whole lot here but it is full of pornlinks)

Compare the French and English versions of 'Shadows':

I say we are being short-changed.

absence and apologies

2006-03-09T13:21:00.000-12:00

Date cancellations

Tue 07-Mar STRASBOURG, la Laiterie
Wed 08-Mar DUDINGEN, Bad Bonn
Thur 09-Mar INNSBRUCK PMK
Fri 10-Mar VIENNA WUK Club

Regarding the cancellation of the above dates, we regret that for
personal reasons the band had to return to the UK earlier than planned. Sincere apologies for inconvenience and disappointment caused. We are currently attempting to re-schedule these dates and hope to see you soon.

In addition, the Belfort show had to be cancelled due to the extreme weather conditions. Again, we look forward to re-scheduling this show also.

öüäüäüöäüöäüöäöü

2006-02-20T00:43:00.000-12:00

The Gravenhurst Multiple-Level Euro Mega Dance Party Sound Machine incorporating Anne Widdecombe's Black Indian Treacle-Mouthed Mock-Leather Caged Dancing Jesus Christ No Oh God No She's Written A Fucking Novel Now Burlesque Revue will be on tour until 12th March or something.

And in a move seemingly designed to piss me off, two of my favourite contemporary bands, The Organ and The Vibration, are once again playing the UK whilst I am away:

http://www.myspace.com/theorgan

http://www.myspace.com/thevibration

Perhaps someone can attend on my behalf and take copious notes so i can enjoy the shows vicariously.

[::-::]

2006-01-08T11:51:00.000-12:00

Thought for the day:

the White Stripes have ripped-off the Runic symbolism aesthetic from my website
http://www.whitestripes.com/news/newsExtra.html

See me after class.

Mood: In Arkansas, shooting empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon with an air rifle, cigars, protein

Listening to:

Neil Diamond - Twelve Songs
Electrelane - Axes
My Morning Jacket/Songs Ohia - split EP
Simon and Garfunkel boxed set
Johnny Cash - At Fulsom Prison

New Year's Resolution: stay in bed drinking Guinness and playing darts. Discard opinions, form no new ones.

hey tastemakers

2005-12-22T06:22:00.002-12:00

My favourite album of 2005

The Organ - Grab that Gun (LP)

it's not out in the UK until 2006
so it gets two cracks at the end of year polls
cunning

I wrote this about it but it didn't get published

"The Organ are from Canada and they are a revelation. Katie Sketch has a fantastic voice. This lady can sing. Powerful, sexual, enigmatic and fragile; she is spilling her guts and I feel like I’m being punched in the heart. This record is burning out my hard drive and deconstruction is an insult. But we have to mention The Smiths – because the songs are that good and because guitarist Deb Cohen has picked up a torch with one hand and thrown down a gauntlet with the other. Some dickhead said "the female Interpol". Thanks dude. Thanks for reminding us that it's a male-dominated industry, but this isn't a posturing attempt to re-capture some coveted, early 80’s post-punk wilderness when melancholy was somehow more ‘authentic’. This is happening right now to these people, in these songs, and they are fantastic and they deserve to be fucking massive."

But what would I know.

Happy New Year

must remember to drink more paint next year

2005-12-20T00:45:00.000-12:00

mood: can't complain, because they actually sewed my lips together

music: The Vibration Hot Chip

Financial Forecast

WATCH GRAVENHURST LIVE IN LONDON AT TISCALI

There's also an interview, but they cut out a crucial part. In response to the question 'is it strange being on Warp, an electronic label?' I said "Yes, it's deeply alienating. When I first came into the Warp office they made me stand on a table and everyone pointed at me. On St. George's Day everyone got a Mars Bar except for me, and it really affected my balance. I can no longer play chess".
__________________________________________________

I really hate Christmas. I'm a Transcendental Atheist Pagan Psychogeographer. I get my spiritual nourishment from the relationship between environment and psyche. Shopping districts at Christmas time are an incitement to religious hatred against my kind. What about me? What about my needs? I'm a religious minority. I'm going to blow myself and everyone else up unless we abolish those fucked up dwarf-santa things that jiggle their hips and sing when you walk past them in service stations, because they give me sexual nightmares.

_____________

Above: Pizza box found in Zurich. I claim my Pulitzer Prize

Here's some things I wrote this year for some magazines that decided not to run them.

What was the first record you ever bought?
Before I bought any records I was given “Bridge of Spies” by T’Pau, which I think is a record we can safely say does not deserve any critical re-appraisal. The first record I actually bought myself was “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys.

And where did you buy it?
I ‘bought’ it from the back seat of a Volvo Estate belonging to a guy down the road. He ‘moved on’ shortly afterwards.

Which musician have you ever wanted to be?
I never really wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a train driver, but I just couldn’t cope with the hardline Trotskyist agitators intent on jeopardising the trade union movement, so I signed to Warp instead. Did you know Dennis Nilsen was active in the trade union movement? He liked to have sex with dead men. I suppose all people have their flaws. We shouldn’t let deviant sexual pathology get in the way of the Great Cause. <>

What do you sing in the shower?
I don’t sing, I scream as the water alternates between extremes of hot and cold. I live in a caravan on a trading estate. When they Pump Up the Shit at the sewage works up the road the plumbing backs up. I hope I sell some records soon.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

There is no point listening to music on a Saturday night, because the social club down the road cranks out Rod Stewart till 3am. When there was a massive riot at a Group 4 prison in 1998 the only way they could restore order was by playing Rod Stewart at deafening levels. Within minutes the inmates were drinking paint, slurring their words and bumping into walls.

Desert island disc:
The thing people don’t seem to clock is that if you are trapped on a desert island you are probably going to die there. You will likely be preoccupied with trying to build a raft or kill and eat a goat than listen to a record. I think a good sound track to slaughtering and gutting an animal for the first time would be “Happy Talk” by Captain Sensible.

Bedtime reading:

Right now I’m reading Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World’. It confirms your worst fears: people are bloody stupid, politicians combine corruption with fashionable economic theories based on blind faith, and socialism is dead because credulous masses would rather consult crystal gazing charlatans than take control of their own lives. As soon as I hear the words “think global, act local” I find myself uprooting saplings and burning polystyrene for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Guilty pleasure:

I still feel pretty guilty about burning down my school when I was 13, but I can’t pretend it wasn’t a big buzz at the time.

Pet hate:

I hate pets. If we killed all the animals, vegetarianism wouldn’t even be an issue. Animal lovers need to look facts in the face: if we don’t kill animals, they will kill each other, and then the terrorists win, right?

_________________________________________________________________-

We made Gravenhurst t-shirts for the tour. Will sell some online at some point.

Circular black holes logo on sky blue

Sold all the masculine, Ernest Hemingway army green ones

They are £15. Expensive because they are American Apparel, which means they are made ethically in the USA, depriving developing countries of much needed manufacturing opportunities.

_________________________________________________________________________

Pictorial Minutes from the 14th Annual Symposium of Gravenhurst Taxidermists
Held at G5, Zurich, Switzerland
"This house believes that we still have much to learn from filling animals with sand"

Left: This is an example of the kind of decline in taxidermic values I am talking about. Sloppy, degenerate. These birds aren't even dead. They are just nailed down.

Left: Good taxidermy. Elegant chandelier display. You don't even know it's there until you stand up quickly and a dead bird crawls into your mouth. It just wants to see what it's like in your mouth, that's all. It just wants to know what it's like being in your mouth.

Left : Relaxing with a new friend.

crackerjack rock attack

2005-12-16T00:41:00.000-12:00

Mood: Screaming Fields of Sonic Love played at half speed on a dictaphone through Andy McNab's gook-spattered balaklava
Music: Low - Long Division

Full tour reports coming up when I fit my teeth back into my head. I took three books on tour with me: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers, and Bukowski's Ham On Rye, but I was too wired/drunk to deal with tiresome things like 'concepts' and 'ideas' and read the soul-stirringly homoerotic Bravo Two Zero. Fact: Andy McNab is a better witer than Ian McKewan, but not as good as Steven King, who isn't as good as Ian Sinclair, whose London Orbital I am now reading.

December 20th onwards: watch Gravenhurst's London show online:
TISCALI SHOWCASE

Includes audience of young girls clapping and wetting themselves on request. Also includes footage of Morning Runner, Coldplay's favourite new band. There's also an interview with me, if they decide to run it.

Rap Star

2005-11-29T00:14:00.000-12:00

mood: X-Ray of a toddler's skull; ear-ache can now be attributed to a spider which has nested in the ear canal. Do we tell the child? Or do we discreetly operate to get rid of the 'infection'? Do we tell the child afterwards?

What would Judge Rheinhold do in this situation?

listening:
Richard Thompson - Small Town Romance
Sandy Denny - Box of Treasures
The National - Alligator
Hans Gruber - New mp3 of "Rap Star" on the Hans Gruber Myspace site. Please listen in full to for maximum enjoyment. The coda is particularly elegant.

Re: National Express/Sewage incident - full story will have to wait until our return from Europe.

Dear Sucker

2005-11-24T05:08:00.000-12:00

US Tour summary:

Tour very good. On returning to England, I had yet another predictably bad experience on National Express which ended up in my shoes, socks, bag and jacket covered in raw sewage. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my ongoing battle with this most complacent and arrogant of companies. Score so far:

National Express: 10
Nick Talbot: nil, excluding a £5 compensation voucher for a service I had told them I would never again be using. Stapled to the voucher was a note that read

Dear Sucker,

Yeah, whatever dude. We are fully aware of our total monopoly of the market, and are certain you'll be back. I mean, what else are you going to do when you need to get a coach from Bristol to Heathrow? Fly? Heh. Get a train instead? Only CEO's like me can afford the train. Please find attached insult, which you may like to add to your injury, loser.

National Express

P.S. Fuck you

Full story next issue.

Europe/UK tour:

30 Nov Leuven, Stuk, Belgium.
1st Dec Paris, Tryptique, France.
3rd Dec Amsterdam, Melkweg, Holland.
4th Dec Koln, Gebaude 9, Germany.
5th Dec Munich, Ampere, Germany.
6th Dec Zurich, G5 Club, Switzerland.
7th Dec Milan, La Casa, Italy.
9th Dec London, Islington Bar Academy, UK.
10th Dec Nottingham, Social, UK.
11th Dec Glasgow, Nice N Sleazy, UK.

Critical re-evaluation of the day:

"Cracklin' Rosie" - Neil Diamond's affectionate paean to the US equivalent of White Lightning, the favoured poison of the homeless alcoholic.

Tiscali Competition

Win a Stagg Drum Kit, Stagg Electric Guitar and Amp and a Stagg Bass Guitar and Amp in a tenuously linked Gravenhurst competition, and watch the upcoming London show on a webcast:

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/music/competitions/comp11.html

Now you can be a power trio, like Gravenhurst, Husker Du, Nirvana and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Stagg also provide a range of delicious and wholesome canned meat dishes:

Bad Press

Uncut : "Early promise goes up in flames" heh heh.

Q: "Experimental songwriter experiments with tedium" That'll be Victoria Segal then, trying to decide which new scene she will be championing. Not ours, that's for sure. I'd love to meet her; i've never met a journalist who isn't wonderfully charismatic and charming in person, only to stab you in the back in writing. Janus-faced whores. Just like me.

Good Press

Many thanks to the excellent Mr. James Dellingpole for his praisesome Telegraph review. It's a shame the Telegraph sub-editor didn't read it, and in the headline described me as a shy young man who is worried about globalisation, when I make it clear in the body of the article that I am emphatically not worried about globalisation, and you'd have to be a dreadful judge of character to describe me as shy.

Pitchfork offered a very positive review, 7/10, though they did regard The Velvet Cell as an "Interpol clone", which means I must have pretty impressive powers of precognition as I wrote that song before Interpol had released a record. I am frequently staggered by hitherto unnoticed talents that just pour out of me like slugs from a discarded pair of swimming trunks.

grab your ankles, it's kingdom time

2005-10-23T02:59:00.000-12:00

Dave's other other band, The Azalea City Penis Club are nearing completion of their debut album. Here you can hear an MP3 and watch a short film of the recording process, and here is their site where there are some photos, including these two of Robin.

Crescent welcome the world

2005-10-20T01:24:00.000-12:00

The elusive Crescent, one of England's finest bands finally have a web presence, after eleven years and four albums. There is even a video for the track "Spring", and some photos of the enigmatic Matt Jones, which proves he really does exist.

http://www.slumberparty.co.uk/crescent

We are off on tour in USA and Canada on tuesday with Broadcast, so this may be the last post for a while. If you have some time to waste, check out my friend Tom's blog. Tom intersperses social commentary with completely impenetrable IT jargon. For the most part I have no idea what he is talking about.

As I explained to a friend the other day (sorry for cribbing emails, Paul), I am trying to stop reading or caring about current affairs because my influence upon the collective stupidity of humankind is close to nil, thus mustering even a passing interest in world developments is arguably an absurd waste of time. Far more important is the fact that my workshop roof is leaking and I need to get it patched, then I can embark on a four week spree of binge drinking and rock music.

See you over the ocean.

Phase IV

2005-10-10T23:51:00.000-12:00

Beatnik Filmstars reform and release new album on Track and Field!

http://www.beatnikfilmstars.co.uk/

love, love, love

2005-10-09T09:49:00.000-12:00

http://www.theorgan.ca

I love this band

wrong kind of jacket

2005-10-06T02:59:00.000-12:00

Neglected musical sub-genre of the day: Aspirational Sports-Rock
Example: Chesney Hawkes - I Am the One and Only
Location: Longwell Green Bowlplex

http://gizmonaut.net/bits/suspect.html

Anyone read Phillip K. Dick's the Minority Report?
Prepare to start being arrested for something you don't know you are about to do.
Just for fun, compare and contrast with Maggie Smith in Gosford Park: "I know what they want before they know they want it".

Thanks to Tom for the link.

Watched Dig!, a film about the rivalry between two bands whose pin-prick egos swell and deflate in time to the rythmic chants of the A + R sycophants who see something revolutionary in their rather average indie rock. The Dandy Whoreholes spend $500,000 on a crap video before they’d even shifted a unit. Then they get a track on a cell-phone commercial and sell loads of records so it's okay. Their mates the Brian Jonestown Massacre don't sell any because their main-man, Anton Newcombe, like Pete Doherty, is a completely deluded fuckhead who can't get his shit together. We watch him snort coke, shoot smack, kick audience members in the face and beat up his band, while his entourage waits patiently for him to finish his magnum opus which will be so amazing it will be, like, so amazing. Everyone is content to indulge the genius, who churns out sub-Jesus and Mary Chain tripe at a rate of one song an hour, but can't finish making the record because he is slowly but surely turning into Billy Corgan. These people don't deserve freedom. They should be exiled to North Korea. The high point of the film was The Dandy Whorehole's Zia McCabe -by far the most likeable of the bunch- getting her tits out on stage.

_____________________________________________

Guy in Philosophy Class Needs to Shut the Fuck Up

the average man

2005-09-26T00:56:00.000-12:00

Spitz show the other night went well, apart from the girl at the side of the stage who kept screaming at me throughout the set.

"I heard your music on the internet. it was much quieter; it was lovely; why can't you play that?". I politely explained that whilst i would dearly love to discuss the matter further, I had a prior appointment with the paying audience who were standing directly in front of me. This bizarre, maternal heckling continued for the whole 45 minutes, interspersed with her squealing to her fuck-witted friends about the merits of her factory-distressed denims. Interesting that this reaction coincided with a documentary about Bob Dylan and the conservative, thought-crime folk crowd who screamed 'Judas!!!!!' when he plugged in. So little has changed.

I'm off to Europe on a press trip, then to a festival in Japan.

I might start using a Gmail account because the other one is riddled with spam. Using mass mailing as a market forces supply /demand indicator, I conclude that the average man is addicted to Vicodin, has a tiny penis, is worried about his portfolio, would love to own a Rolex watch and secretly wants Japanese girls to shit on his chest.

What would the benign, intellectually and emotionally advanced alien species think.

-Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells.

what we do vs. what we stand for

2005-09-19T09:17:00.000-12:00

The debate has collapsed into a familiar, simplistic dualism: The Islamists hate us for what we do in the Middle East (usually an 'anti-war' stance), versus The Islamists hate us for what we stand for -democracy, religious pluralism- (usually a 'pro-war' stance).

Perhaps the Islamists rationalisations for their actions are not absolutely identical to the causes of their actions. It is
plausible that the things that motivate us are not always what we think they are. Religious fundamentalism and hatred for what is seen as crusading, Christian, US Imperialism form a vicious circle, with each action confirming and enforcing both convictions.

The same could be said of those who chose to go to war. Bush may honestly believe he is fighting to liberate
people from tyrants, but he is influenced by the people around his head, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, whose
integrity is highly suspect. Bush is largely a fool, but I think he often believes what he says. As for Blair...

Bush and Blair gave us more than one reason for invading Iraq. Bertrand Russell taught us to be suspicious of a
man who offers more than one argument for the same position. If a position is truly robust then a single defense will be compelling. The multiple defence suggests a lack of conviction. Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Nick Cohen, to their credit, argue for the war in Iraq one the sole basis of liberation. But as gifted polemicists they typically offer hard-edged, ideological answers. Their take on it has a refreshing directness and simplicity, but we should be wary of simple answers to complex questions.

Robin Cook's reasons for opposing the war were not ideological. He believed that acting without a UN mandate
would cause international friction that would in the long run outweigh the humanitarian benefits of regime change in Iraq. Much of the Muslim world would view it as a war on Islam, which it isn't. But people's views matter, whether or not they are mistaken. Cook's reasons were pragmatic. We should have more time for pragmatism. This cuts both ways. It means that now we are in Iraq, whether it was a mistake or not, we have to do our best to help the country achieve stability. The immediate withdrawal demanded by many on the Left would not achieve this.

Boris Johnson supported the invasion on the very grounds on which Cook opposed it. Johnson believed that it
would in the end cause more good than harm. But as Dr. Manhattan pointed out to Adrian Veidt at the end of Alan Moore's Watchmen, there is no 'end'. Consequences never end, and unlike Dr. Manhattan we don't have the superhuman ability to see how things might have turned out if we had done otherwise. There is no way of knowing whether Cooke was right or Johnson was right. So we have to make the best of it.

acrid folk

2005-08-21T22:15:00.000-12:00

mood: hah hah hah hah hah
music: Sons and Daughters - the Repulsion Box

Today’s post fulfills this blog’s subtitle, being a sour-grapes folk darling anecdote I got from a friend in the USA who is in a band called Baltic Knot. All names and locations have been changed to protect the guilty.

“Last summer James and I played a show in Boston with the Beltane Yews and Snakedial. When we got there this guy came up to James and was like "James?!? What are you doing here? Did you move to Boston?" (I can't remember the dude's name so let's call him Mo. I think his stage name is like Gandalf Pendragon or some shit) and James’s like "no, Mo. I'm playing a show here with my band. What are you doing here?" and he's like "oh, I'm in the Beltane Yews".

”So it turns out that this guy and his band used to all live in Portland and when they were in high school they would come in to the record store where James worked and made fun of him for listening to "pussy-ass-shit" like Pearls Before Swine and Vashti Bunyan. At the time, they were in a band called "Backdraft" that apparantly sounded like Fugazi. But then they moved to Brooklyn and bought some folk albums and you know the rest.

“So the capper of the evening was when I wandered down to the greenroom and smoked a joint with these a-holes and overheard the following conversation:

Snakedial guy #1: "so what's with this Baltic Knot?"
Snakedial guy #2: "oh, you know... just another one of those psych folk bands"
Beltane guy # 1: "ugh. I'm so sick of that shit."
Beltane guy # 2: "no man, they're the real deal. their guitarist James, he used to follow the Dead and sell acid in the 80's."
Snakedial guy # 1: "huh. whatever."

________________________________________

Guy Bartell phoned me up the other week to tell me he had been suffering a recurring dream that he had died, and in the film of his life he was played by Judge Rheinhold.
_______________________________________________________________________

Simplistic peaceniks churn out Ghandi quotes at times like this.Here Guy and I offer some alternatives:

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world seeing eye to eye”

“An eye for an eye means the innocent have nothing to fear”

“An eye for an eye leaves me feeling a lot better about the little f*cker that broke into my car”

“An eye for an eye ensures equal rights for the visually impaired”

art school confidential

2005-08-20T23:44:00.000-12:00

Found out about this from Louche Librarian's blog.

"Terry Zwigoff is making a film of Dan Clowes' excellent Art School Confidential comic strip, a scathing denunciation of the poseurs and weirdos you find at art school. I haven't heard of the leads, but with John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston and Jim Broadbent in support, this is already looking pretty damn good."

Glad we can now criticize the institution of the contemporary art college without sounding like Brian Sewell. Similarly, we can now like Heavy metal without seeming ironic.
Hopefully, one day I can profess my penchant for hard drugs without giving the impression that I actually take them.

The Police Diver's Notebook

Winterbrass - Jason Tyndall

Ghosting The North

Bert Jansch 1943-2011

Rest in peace dear Trish, we'll miss you

Bookish-priapic

Gravenhurst news

ULTRASKULL IS BACK! 100%! NEW: MINI ISSUE THREE

signals on the wire/2151/ transmission one

Just The Weight Of The Water

RIP Gordon Burn January 16, 1948 - July 17, 2009

Listen to me, Butterfly

Bi-Frontal Stereotactic Sub-Caudate Trachtotomy And The Infinite Sadness

Why I Hate Rock 'n' Roll

Today (unedited)

Sloppy Thinking Day

Identity,1,2,3

Why this blog died for a while

English trash in Belgian bins

Busines as usual, or, watching 'The Deerhunter' on Ketamine

interim

Krill

Ghosts on camera

Hill vs. Boorman

Sick as a Pike

The Velvet Cell

Piece Of Mind

The thought police get all hard for justice

Away

Westminster… we have a problem…

Spitalfields… we have a problem...

Diana Death Cult: Cthulhu Implicated

Booze Britain

Richard Dawkins: Mind Cop

Groovy fascists

1 x 1 = 11

Regarding the reflexive plasticity of the labour market / gay shower scene

Vile

Glastonhurst Gravenblog Report

'Clive Burr was a better drummer than Nicko McBrain' - Discuss

The results of a rigorous two-week programme of lifestyle awareness

Political Correctness Gone Right

Greetings from the new bottom of the same lake

Breakfast Lieutenant aka. Bad Club

Burning witches brings people together

Neutral pig's head island

Damp food, bright lights, dead eyes

All Tomorrow's Parents

terrorists/hot women

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you

like, one day I was in Lidl innit

Ultraskull Presents: News summary in animated Gifs

Rumsfeld: "I am human and I need to be loved"

You're fucked

This could go on forever, in which case I’m doomed.

It's not right, but it's not wrong

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"...

Verhoevenfest 2006

slap my hand

I don’t have any skin

and they catch him, and they say he's mental

Growling for dog food

it's the turnstiles that make us hostile

I will not change and I will not be nice

What's the secret, Max?

message on an ill wind

I'll have you, I will

kill yr idols

Somebody left the door open and the wrong dogs came home

DAXX: Total C****

Furious, Tonbridge Wells

terrorism rescues earth from environmental catastrophe

left the house, returned

f**** s***** **** ***** *** ****

an award ceremony where everyone wins a f***

meanwhile

ULTRASKULL COMIC ONLINE

Joan sez

urrr

absence and apologies

f** s* * * ****