SUE AND SALLY SMITH: FLYING NURSES

I can't believe Lurch gave me his old copy of this! It normally goes for 300-400 bucks on Rarecomix.com.

Still, these characters are soooo ripe for a Future.Pop make-over or maybe a Hentai (eeek; just kiddin'!). I'd love to remix them - in fact, the ideas are just flooding out of me brain even as we speak. I wonder who has the rights to them - did they go to DC as part of that job-lot of Charlton characters that followed (Sue & Sally Smith cover-artist) Dick Giordano? If so, then I'm amazed that Alan Moore never borrowed them for "Watchmen" - lol.

No doubt, by monday morning my in-box will be full of emails from DC-Vertigo editors begging me to tell them my spin on 'em. Or maybe even someone from Marvel asking me to do a "Night Nurse" one-off.

"Night Nurse"- now yr talkin'...

THE SCANNER WHO BECAME HIS OWN HEADSTONE

It was a nice, quiet do, just like "Barry" would've wanted. There was just me and a couple of toasters and that old jug-kettle he used to hang out with. He was like that, you know - very down-to-earth and unpretentious - you'd never find him hanging around wine-bars with flashy-lookin' computer peripherals.

I thought the vicar's speech was lovely. But when he asked if anyone wanted to share their memories of "Barry" I had such a big lump in my throat I couldn't say anything. All those great times we shared together - the old comics and the pulp novels; the whacky pritstik collages; the antiquarian maps and the bodily parts we used to copy...

*Choke* I miss ya, buddy.



When "Barry" was terminally ill recently and I...I had to take him to the electrical-goods hospice, 'cause we...'cause we couldn't, y'know, nurse him properly at home...(sorry about this; I'm still a little choked up)...I briefly speculated about an after-life for electrical retail-goods. Something that didn't occur to me at the time was the idea that there might be a White Goods Wheel of Karma, that household items could be, well, reincarnated...

In one of those weird twists of The Tao my sister-in-law just randomly gave me her old scanner today (she'd won a new one in a raffle!) w/out even knowing about my recent, uh...bereavement. And, well - blow me down wiv a fevver if it wasn't a Umax Astra 2100U - the next model up from "Barry". It's like...fuck, it's like they could be twins. Quite remarkable, really.

So I plugged it in using the old leads and it fired up straight away; didn't even need to download new drivers. Ha!

Well, I think me and "Terry" are gonna be great pals!

HANNAH MONTANA: ICE BIRD SPIRAL ARE WRITING MY NEW SINGLE

Spotted on the Internet by Devon-based blogger Dom Zero:



Cloudboy's gonna shit kittens when he sees this. Love the jewellery, sweetheart.

Uh-ho, Disney's lawyers are on the phone, again...

FXHE; PSYCHOTIC PHOTOSYNTHESIS

FXHE Records: "The Grandson of Detroit Techno" fer sure.

"Psychotic Photosynthesis" certainly hit a spot with this particular Techno-avoidin' blogger.

And Omar-S is a funny guy too: "I hate remixes! Remixes are whack!" I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks that.

Thanks to Kiran for hepping me to this; one of the wonders of Twitter.

STEPHANIE ZEN, GENERIC SUPERMODEL SPY

Oh, and Stephanie Zen, Generic Supermodel Spy too! Crikey, I'd forgotten about her! Might have to tun her into a comic or something...

This is what I like about this whole Internet-as-a-Pub-Substitute thing; you get to talk shit about relatively arcane topic-hobbies, but some of the shit you talk about occasionally becomes an actuality; off-hand comments sometime transform into musical/artistic collaborations - whereas in the pub they used to just turn into hang-overs.

SURVIVORS

One by one, the survivors crawl out into the cold, harsh light of day. Not denial, but more like the aftermath of some Arts Council-funded re-enactment of Cronenberg's "Rabid" or Romero's "The Crazies", but staged by old people...lol...

Never has one person *allegedly* falling over in the garden been so fiercely debated on the internet. It's true, however, that Dom and Jim - our cat - had a bit of a falling out during a late-night discussion on the merits of Vernor Vinge's novels. Jim came down in favour of "A Fire Upon The Deep", while Dom favoured "Marooned in Realtime"...things got a bit heated due to the amount of alcohol that had been consumed by both parties, claws were de-pawed and things were said that I'm sure both of them now regret. The arguement ended with Jim stomping off in a bit of a petulent hissy fit and spraying the garage with his arse-glands. (Or was that Dom, I forget...)

Anyway, I enjoyed myself immensely - so thanks to you all for coming! T'was great to see you all!

And thanks to Doppelganger for the framed drawings of three of the Annual Kid Shirt Summer Make-over Personnae: Kid Squid, Kid Moth and Kid Creme. Aren't they fabulous!? I'm going to have to dig deep into my Archetype Wardrobe this year to come up w/ something new...

AVANT GARDE FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Avant Garde For The New Millennium (Raw Dog Screaming Press) is now available for Pre-Orders on Amazon.



This anthology features a mega-talented pack of howling mad-dog writers from both sides of the pond - quite a few of which I know and some I don't - you are hereby advised to score a copy of this pronto if you have any interest whatsoever in cool alternative lit.shit...once this sells out you'll be kicking yourself for missing it; soon you'll find yrself frequenting strange ill-lit bars frequented by *******'s and reduced to scavaging for food from pedal-pins. Avoid this fate by buying a copy, or even two! You won't regret it. You children will thank you for it. It's an investment; a life-style choice.

Owning a copy of this book is guaranteed to get you laid.

You will be intellectually irresistable. Strangers will throw - no, hurl themselves at you the second you buy a copy of this book; it's a literary pheromone thing.

It contains a story by me called "The Reformation" wh/ is pretty flippin' cool; but - hey! - the whole durn book is uber-boss.

YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS OUT!

IF YOU DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK THE SPACE-PEOPLE WILL NOT TAKE YOU UP IN THEIR BIG SILVER MOTHERSHIP ON EARTHDEATH DAY! And that would not be a good thing.

More on this soon.

My niece's husband broke his leg playing football on saturday after a rather harsh tackle. He carried on playing for a few minutes, but gave up as his leg was 'troubling him a bit'. He is 40.

He went two two parties on saturday night and showed no evidence of being in pain, apart from walking a little 'stiffly' - I thought he'd just had a few lagers.

On sunday, the egg-sized lump on his leg had not gone down. He poked at it and it made a loud clicking sound, so the penny finally dropped that he was prodding a fractured bone that was trying to protrude out through the skin of his leg. He drove himself to casualty where he was told his bone had shattered and it now resembled crazy-paving on the x-ray.

He is a fireman. I don't see him very often, tho I actually bumped into him a week or so ago attending a fire on Stiby Road. A gang of kids had torched some lock-up garages. "Bloody nuisance," he shrugged, "I'd just settled down to watch the footy."

He now has an open wound in his leg, but doesn't want to make a fuss about it.

The firemen round our way are hard as fucking nails.

SHATNERQUAKE

Congrats to Jeff Burk for getting this published. Available (soonish) from Eraserhead Press. Starring "TJ HOOKER, DANNY CRANE, RESCUE 911 SHATNER, SINGER SHATNER, SHAKESPEAREAN SHATNER, TWILIGHT ZONE SHATNER, CARTOON KIRK, PRICELINE SHATNER..." etc, etc LOL!

It's Shatnertastic!

Gaaaah! The flint in me Fall lighter is knackered and it will not ignite. Clearly, some sort of Fascist plot.

I'm going to dress up as a member of The Afrika Korps.

Now, where did I put my boot-dagger?

If Dom's bringing his Luftwaffe gloves, then I'm taking my The Fall lighter.

I bumped into Shaggy in town just now and he suggested we should mass-adopt some sort of WW2 memorabilia dress-code tonight, like it was a bloody Lemmy Kilminster convention or summat.

Brian's rig looks fucking awesome.

DAHN THE CLUB

I was gutted - and I know John Eden will be too - to discover that they had repaired the slashed seat. Still, all is not lost, me lovelies, for they have reupholstered their chairs in a garish citus orange and lemon yellow. Ha!

Meanwhile, tho, I've been going dahn The Club. Yep, The Social Cub. And I was both heartened and relieved to discover that they had a slashed seat on the premises. So here it is, John - just for you (well, okay, and me too):



Okay, okay, I know - bad picture! (it's on the left n you have to zoooom in)- I'll try and get a better shot of the slash tonight.





So, anyway, this is the venue where we're having our piss-up tonight - dahn The Social, see? - tho not in that room. Even as I speak the three Emerson, Lake & Palmer lorries are unloading Brian's 20ft high Disco light-panels and a mirror-ball the size of Phoebe.

Thanks to Psychbloke Ade for doing the fabulous flier - it's a beaut:



I'm hoping for a 5-blog cross-over tonight. Still, I'm a bit alarmed that Dom is bringing his Luftwaffe gloves. Uh-ho. That can only mean one thing...

ICE BIRD SPIRAL: PSYCHIATMC BLOEMS

The new Ice Bird Spiral release "Psychiatmc Bloems" is now available - a ltd hand-numbered cassette-tape available from our pals over at the ever-wonderful Flemish label Funeral Folk.



The Funeral boys have done us proud on the art front: the css is packaged in classic trad.brol FF house-style, a sort of scissors n glue take on faux-gothic-medievalism. Long term readers will be aware that I'm a huge fan of the label and their various bands n sub-projects, so I'm completely over the moon that IBS are now part of their catalogue.

It would be churlish and, er, thoroughly bad-form for me to review our own release (tho I'm sorely tempted lol - still, any volunteers?), so all I'll say for now is that it consists of a single long piece that is sub-divided - concept-album style! - into a series of interwoven sections, each of which has a different vibe or musical mood. A few brave souls who've checked it out have described it as sounding kinda 80s Brit.Industrial-ish in places, but with a fucked-up Pysch undertow. NWW has also been mentioned as a reference point, which is incredibly flattering. Of course, none of these things were even faintly or consciously intentional - basically, we just get on and do what we do lol - but I totally get what they're saying and why they're saying it.

Some other IBS releases are fairly imminent. Each of which sounds completely different to the next, wh/ is very exciting to me; I really can't work out where this is all going. I think we should write a musical next lol.

Anyway, please grab a copy from the Funeral Folk guys and while you're there snag some of their other stuff; I totally recommend it - that is, if you can find anything that hasn't sold out! - please support this brilliant and idiosyncratic label. (plus our kids need some new shoes) We'll be selling a few copies from our own site at some point later in the year - but go direct to the label to score 'em there first.

"TIME..."

Rumours of my recent death are...well, just that: rumours...

Still, it was my b/day a couple days ago and, at my age, each b/day is like a little death in its own right. So, we usually celebrate them round our way by playing Russian Roulette, Vietnamese style. Or kicking a crack-dealer's pit-pull. Y'know, doing something life-affirming, something that gets the corpuscles a-flowin'...

My scanner is dead tho. It has flatlined. Goodbye, ol' faithful electrical-item of 10-years good-standing. The landfill doth call thee.

Shame, there was some interesting stuff I wanted to post recently. Some dumbass books and things. 70s porn-mags. Columbian pysch-folk albums. No, really.

Still, here's a pic that my good pal Andy Clarke sent me, of our old 2000AD character Rose O'Rion. "Has it really been 10 years?" he asked. Yep, I'm afraid it has.

"Time, he flexes like a whore..."

TOM BRADLEY, ASPHALT FLOWERHEAD, ETC

The awesome Tom "Lemur" Bradley, here in fine fastdump wordsquirt mode talking about all sorts of stuff (it's supposed to be an interview, y'dig; but Tom heads off into Tomspace as only Tom can...) incl. some yippage on Forrest Armstrong's incoming new novel "Asphalt Flowerhead" - which Tom edited and wh/ is v. imminent on D.W.'s soon-to-be-legendary Chrossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink imprint.

"For Fluxical-Concretical literature, Haptical-Fluxical, Concretical-Hapitcal, Fluxical-Haptical-Concretical, Ahadada are the only men. And I'm chuffed to be dunked in Duchamp's pissoir (that's their logo), paddling alongside such swimmers as Mark Spitzer, former zipper-upper of the Cyber Bag; Simon Perchik, "the most widely published unknown poet in America"; Ur-Ethnopoet Jerome Rothenberg; Richard Peabody, founder of the legendary Gargoyle Magazine; Daniel Sendecki, chronicler of lotuses among the land mines--and, most of all, Jesse Fuckin' Glass, playwright, poet, fictionist, performance artist, star of Filmgruppe Chaos, dispatcher of email messages that traumatize your intercostal muscles, and wielder of the monkey wrench that cinches the Ahadada plumbing..." Et cetera.

Go, Tom, go!

COTOPAXI, ETC: LIVE, THIS SATURDAY

SAT FEB 21, 2009 - 20:00

COTOPAXI (de / nl)
WAIKIKI WALHALLA (ecu / uk / be)
SURPRISE ACT
DJ COOL BROCOLI
DJ BONGO MAN

café 't kan gi kwoet (ex-café de student)
paleizenstraat 76 rue des palais, 1030 brussels
tram 92, 94, 25, 55, 56
entrance: chapeau

COTOPAXI (de / nl)
"Both schooled at a young age to be free with sound they manage to create interesting compositions almost out of thin air. Their approach is warm and positive resulting in a 'good times' feel that will leave a smile in the hearts of the listener, so in their own way they are making the world a better place" (Ernie McCracken). Cotopaxi is the cool duo of Hannah MOEMLIEN and Johann FYOELK from the great STENZE QUO tape label.

WAIKIKI WALHALLA (ecu / uk / be)
"Weaving continous threads of sounds, we shall draw you house and lake and crowns" (Mei Yi). Hypnotic compositions in full slow motion exotic mode played on the sweetest instruments. Second gig by this band featuring members of BUFFLE, SUNNY DISPOSITION and THE CONTINENT MAKERS.

SURPRISE ACT
No idea. But very special.

DJ COOL BROCOLI (be)
DJ Cool Brocoli is Robert Louis Stevenson's cosmic grandson, the most charming philosopher and story teller you will ever meet on your journey to the Samoan Islands (as it was told us by the Venerable Lama Sailor Scott Rinpoché).

DJ BONGO MAN (rdc)
One night meditating under the branches of his favorite baobab, Dj Bongo Man listened to the whispers of the sebene spirits. Be inspired by this sorcerer's teachings.

(Can't make it to this one because (a) I'm in a different country, and (b) I'm attending a party of my own lol...so I'm relying on you to go in my place!)

TWITTERFEED ON!

"Twitterfeed on!"

Johnny Storm streaks off into the NY skyline,followed by a trail of burning mobile-phones and net-books. Pedestrians curse and complain as they're showered by smoldering circuit-boards and blazing iPhones.

Okay, so this post is a Twitterfeed test. Now I just need to find some twits...er, I mean, tweets...er, I mean, twerps..oh, you know...people to read the damn posts.

COME ON OVER

Man, I'm speechless. The mighty Ruela remixes one of my old films.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

Thanks, man.

BOSCH IN A BUCKET

If Bosch were alive today he'd be working with Photoshop. It's Feb 16th and the compost-bin is swarming with tiny demonic faces and vegetable homunculi, a miniature Hades in a hand-bucket - the impossible sits in plain view holding hands with the banal, barely bothering to disguise itself.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELLIS

Oh, so Warren's an Aquarius too. (And on the cusp with Pisces) That kinda explains a thing or two.

Happy Birthday, Ellis, you mad old bastard.

ONE HUNDRED (SLIGHT RETURN)

Apologies to Tim Footman. Ages ago he did a 100 Best Tunes post which I started to respond to. But, as usual, life got in the way. From time to time I tinker with this post, but at latest count I'd only got to, er, 17.

It wasn't 100 tunes, but 100...I dunno, observations, comments, things...most of no significance whatsoever; strangely, it was the act of doing it that interested me, and not so much the result. I was gonna follow Tim's original rhizomatic/fractal template and just let stuff flow out of me sub-sub-conscious-group-mind-thing and let it bounce around and then fall. Since it's taken so long for me to get my shit together it'll be an interesing snapshot of my mind free-associating w/ itself, but over a longish period of time. I had a lot of great ideas along the way, but I kept forgetting them by the time I got home lol. It might be the biggest post I've ever done...or it might not. But I'm definitely gonna do it when time allows. Personally, I think the One Hundred idea is a great one - tho a big committment in terms of time - and I'd like to see some other bloggers put their spin on this at some point.

CONE ZERO/BABYLON!

More in-box nonsense:

There's another cool review of Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero over here on the Dreaming of Babylon site...which reminded me what a terrific antho this is. It's slowly been soaking up some great reviews over the last few months - if you haven't got round to buying a copy yet, then you really should do. The authors - incl. myself - will eventually be unmasked later in the spring. Until then, the author identification competition is still running, so you've still got a couple months to win yrself a crisp £50 note by entering....

Meanwhile, the little fella featured on the T-shirt below (focus, fellas, focus...!) slowly inches his way towards global domination:




"It's Just The Dub Talking."

I've got a feeling - call it a hunch, or whatever you like - that you're going to be seeing a lot more of him and his friends later this year. Created by the awesomely talented Doppelganger and, er, myself - he's an oddly poignant symbol of our times lol - the Anti-Hero of Dub that you've all been waiting for. No, really, you have - you just don't know it yet. More info soon (hopefully), but I think you're going to enjoy his 'adventures'. He made my 4-year old daughter laugh out loud and she knows absolutely nothing about the history of UK Urban Bass Music.

In a typically PoMo fashion he's appeared on a T-Shirt first before inevitably colonising other media. Be first on your block to get one; be the envy of yr friends, etc - available here from High Rise Clothing, a sort of weird affiliate or sub-imprint of Bristol's excellent Rooted Records.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AQUARIANS

Many happy - slightly belated - returns to Ruela, another fellow Aquarian!

And - waitagoddamn minute - isn't Farmer Glitch's b/day around here somewhere too...? HB, Farmer! See ya soon, man!

And Circle Brophy too - so, far, far away....I'm putting together a package for ya, man - please be patient!

Happy birthday to all you Aquarian bastards everywhere!!

SOME TUNES N STUFF

Okay, a few gentle stretching exercises first, before we start - something just to warm me muscles up. Wouldn't want to do myself a mischief.

Let's start w/ some recent stuff that's oozed into my in-box:

Black to Comm are from Germany and - you know what? - I really bloody like them. All those overlaid organ-pulses and the hysterical backwardsmasked monkeychatter on "Orange Record" has left a residual creamyness in my hind-mind. It's like listening to "North Star" era Philip Glass with one finger on the cassette fast-forward button...an alien carousel spinning out of control, careening through the methane clouds high in the Jovian ammoniasphere - flashes of bemask'd Saturnian prossies in fin de siècle costumes speeding past, round and round, on grotesque enamelled horses, winking and promising you all sorts of naughty stuff...of course, as usual, you wind up paying for it later with your soul.

And there's something simple, but oddly compelling about the slow-orbiting dronelayers that cycle round the edge of "The Male Garden" - John Cale and Co. did this sort of thing 45 years ago in their NY lofts and garrets, but overdriven organchords are kinda timeless, don't you think? "Sleeep" is kinda nice too; there's a queasy somnambulance about it. I'm glad they describe th/r stuff as "tape music" - it's got that hissy warp-age; the sense of sounds stret-t-t-ching in slowtime around tape-spools, of moments unravelling, of microseconds being eroded by physical motion.

This album ("Fractal hair Geometry") looks interesting:



You can buy their stuff here.

Zerosum is a publishing-house with a difference. They're based in Liège, in Belgium, and they create some extremely beautiful hand-bound silk-screen books. Apparently they work with ink and peanut-butter. Mmmmmm: yummy!

De!nial are Japanese synth-punk-pop; they remind me of Plastics and that's not a bad thing. They sound like Devo with a malfunctioning flanger and Attention Deficit Disorder. If you like yr synthesiser-groups shouty, shrill and propelled by slappy, malignant-sounding hand-claps, then look no further. Break out the lime-green leg-warmers!

Cheers to Tom Peverelist for sending over the latest Punch Drunk release (number eleven!!) - and it's a real corker. I'm listening to this even as I type - see, men can multi-task!: "Orchestral Lab" by Guido is full of slippery synth-horns and slinky trumpet-stabs and pitchwheel-bent squarewave bass; a strange beast, this one - it combines mock-pompous orch-synth frippery with batchelor-pad smoooovery: "Come here, girl - n let's get busy!" But she skips off across the shag-pile rug, shimmmmaying past the weird-looking back-lit aquarium and does a teasy little dance in the doorway to the kitchen.

I really like this: all its edges are rubbed smooth and gleaming - all cocaine-chrome, recessed lighting and matt-black worksurfaces - cheeky, playful, a synthetic silk-shirt of a tune; it's like Dubstep finding its Dad's old records in the attic and trying them on for size.

(At this point I popped outside (it's about 9:30 in the evening over here) and had a translated/broken-english chat w/ my Polish neighbours - they're smoking meat over their fire-pit (twenty-foot sausages and whole carps) and drinking bottled beer - we're doing this weird fire-wood-for-smoked-sausage-n-chicken trade-bartering thing at the moment; I'll be posting more on this another day...n then my wife came home and we had a couple drinks, n then back to finish off the post....)

"U Make me Feel" starts with a nice stiff-legged, wooden-sounding clunkdrum - a helical synspiral corkscrews up to the ceiling; it reminds me of a car-engine ticking over - a weird bubblecar thing navigating the streets of some Second Life wireframe city; a world populated by soulboy avatars and neon lightning-flash motifs. The track quickly opens up; strings unfurl; pianos are, uh, tinkled... there's a sudden flurry of activity - sounds swirl upwards; it's like an ABC B-Side defrosting 100 years later in some cryo-unit to find cultural archeologists have already created some new 20-minute flash-trend based around it. Synthetic Grimesoul meets 80's android-pop. It's pretty wonderful - Poptastic, in fact!

Guido hails from the same weird Bristolian musical microverse as Joker. There's a mix here.

MISSING BLOG

Poor little blog went missing...poor little blog got lost in the garden at night, like a cat with no sense of smell. The blog disappeared for a few days, didn't return when you rattled a box of soya-crunchies out on the patio or played its favourite record.

Where have you been, little blog? What happened to you? Are you alright? We put up posters with a picture of you on the local telegraph-poles.

An old lady finds the blog shivering under a bush. It looks sickly and unwell, its ribs protruding like sticks. She calls to it, trying to coax it out. "Are you alright, little fella? Don't be frightened - I won't hurt you."

The blog eyes her suspiciously. Something's spooked it, made it wary of humans - but what? I guess we'll never know. Did it spend the week locked in someone's garage or their tool-shed? Maybe it had a fight with next door's blog - did that nasty big Doppleganger blog chase it across the neighbouring gardens? Did that weird-looking blog up the road called Loki hiss and spit at it, send it packing off its turf? It looks round warily as the old lady tries to tempt it out with a saucer of milk and a plate of Kit-e-Blog gone well past its sell-by date. "Come on out - that's it, boy. Don't be scared."

You should never give a hedgehog milk. It can make them very sick.

Is that true or did I just make it up? An old-wives tale. Round our way the gypsies used to bake hedgehogs - wrap them up in a big ball of clay and roast them. When they were cooked the clay would crack open and you could pull out all the spines and get at the meat. For a while you could buy hedgehog-flavoured crisps.

I've been busy. Very busy. But I'm not going to protest too much, methinks, 'cos I get to do lots of things that I really enjoy and that other people would kill to do. So I'm not moaning, just busy.

And my poor ol' scanner is on its last legs. I've had to resusitate it a few times now, de-frib it: "CLEAR!" What do scanners see when they leave their physical bodies - do they travel down a long tunnel of light. Do they see everything they've ever scanned flashing past them at once? Is there an after-life for electrical appliances - where do the anima that sit at the heart of the allegedly inanimate go when they die? Do souls run on 240 volts AC?

Perhaps I'm just being cruel - maybe I should just let him go, you know? My scanner is 10 years old - that's 17 in cat-years, 114 in human-years and 3-and-a-half months in blog-years. But I just can't bear the thought of life without him. Sure, I could get another scanner, but it...well, it just wouldn't be the same.

But that poor ol' blog...take him indoors and give him a plate of food, let him settle down in front of the fire. We'll soon put some meat back on his bones.

More in a minute.

KELP PHANTOM

CRAMPS: REWIND

I was gonna say last night - but I was tired and went to bed - that I thought pretty much everything by The Cramps after "Human Fly"/"Gravest Hits" was superfluous.

Jeez, I know how inflammatory and annoying that probably sounds, but just me finish..."Human Fly" (etc) is such a fabulous mission-statment and it's so pretty much pitch-perfect that maybe it accidentally set the bar, well, almost too high to follow. That low-slung schlockabilly gravel n grind that they invoke on their opening salvo of songs fell out from it's trailer-trash stripper-mom's hips almost fully formed.

As great as The Cramps were, I always felt kinda semi-disappointed by most of the stuff that followed, but only because those early records were so great. I think they had problems with Miles Copeland and his lawyers, as well as a fast turn-round of band-members, so maybe they lost their momentum a bit, and as they hit the early/mid-80s the production values went up a bit and the energy-levels on record didn't quite match the stage-shows. I'm sure that, uh, 'proper' fans like John Eden'll shoot me down on all of this and I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong and that Record-X is a stone-classic that I really should check out. Opinions: everyone's got one.

I remember a piece on Lux and Ivy in one of the Incredibly Strange Music books a few years back that I found really touching - it was about their collection/collecting of rare/obscure Rockabilly and Garage Rock records, horror movie memorabilia, burlesque, etc. What was great about it was that it was obvious that the pair of them lived in their own little quasi-obsessive bubble-universe to one side of consensual reality. Between them, they had settled on a Way of Being that fitted them as snuggly as a vinyl cat-suit - and I just found that whole piece just wonderful to read and kinda quietly inspiring. It was pretty much inevitable that their intense fascination w/ Garage-Schlock Obscurabillia would've eventually found an expression in the physical world as a band (or something) and a great one, at that. And they were both clearly devoted to each other.

My heart really goes out to Ivy. Lux was her soul-mate, that once-in-a-lifetime buzzom-buddy that most people just dream of finding. I can only imagine what her loss must be like - but I'm thankful that they both found time to share themselves - along with all of their wonderful innerworld obsessions - with the rest of us.

God bless ya.

RIP LUX INTERIOR

ON NOT GETTING YOUR END AWAY

What were we talking about? What was it now? - I can't remember...

Me and this bloke I know called Richard were talking this morning about being dumbstruck as teenagers where girls were concerned, our mouths packed with cottonwool and solidified spittle - you're 16 and a girl tries to talk to you and suddenly you can't speak. Hrrrmp...frrf...mrrgl...

This was the 70s, of course - I'm sure that teenagers don't have social-awkwardness problems now - I mean that's just not possible, is it? Not with all those different games-consoles and internet service-providers to talk about. And wasn't that what Emo was invented for? - so you could show your rough-but-sensitive side when you invite Indie-Gurl Lucy or Jenny or Penny or whatever up to your bedroom to drink coffee (mum and dad are downstairs playing on the Wii): music to fill that awkward inter-gender communication gulf, to spark that kinetic arc, the lunge that bridges slow-boiling desire and End-Point A: gullet-wrestling...

There was no courtship music when I was young. There was Prog and 'Eavy and then - suddenly! - there was Punk. Eeek! Just one excuse after another to hang in the corner w/ with the lads. Safety in numbers. School and college discos weren't no help neither - it was all Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, Jeff Beck's "Hi Ho Silver Lining", "Jet" by Wings, Genesis' "I Know What I Like" (yeah, just rub it in, Gabriel, whydontcha?), Bowie's "Jean Genie", Sabbaff's "Paranoid"...I mean, I'd kill to go to a disco like that now - but it just didn't...ah, shucks, you know...Disco was strictly for poofs, so it didn't get played and we all stuck to one side of the wall, chugging on our dad's hip-flasks and smoking Peter Stuyvesants, while the gurls stayed over on their side giggling and flicking their hair and pretending to be in Pan's People...a few brave strutting manchiks would brave no-man's land, but quickly return looking perplexed...

(Would-be lothario shouts in girl's ear over booming Uriah Heep track): "You wanna dance, then?"

Girl (pulling pained expression): "No."

Occasionally, Nektar would come to Yeovil and we'd all stand and watch the light-show, seething with sexual frustration. Only our Secret Philly-Loving pal would ever pull...

We had this mate, see, who was incredibly successful with the girls - we were in awe of him: after a string of laydees, he had a steady g/friend at 16 and they were sleeping together...her mum knew and put her on the Pill. It was all just so...so...fuck, it completely blew our minds. Getting a girl: that was Rock Star stuff, a BBC drama presentation...Play For Today, you know?

"How did that happen?" we all wondered, scratching our feather-cuts (a perm in my case).

Well, later on I discovered that, in amongst all the 10cc and the Todd Rungren albums, he'd stashed "3+3" by The Isley Brothers...records by The Blackbyrds, The Stylistics, assorted Philly albums...

Smart lad.

He's dead now, tho. I haven't seen him for ages, but I miss him like fuck.

Still, it's a wonder the human-race didn't die out sometime around 1975, leaving only our pal and his girlfriend left as the new post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve, but unable to reproduce 'cos she was still, you know, on The Pill. (I saw her recently in WH Smiths, actually, but didn't say hello - 'cos I was too shy. She hasn't aged well. Actually, when he dumped her I managed to snog her at a friend's party - a quiet passage on a Vangelis album ("Heaven and Hell") was my entry-point - that, and a half-bottle of Dubonet - but she spent the entire, er, interaction looking over my shoulder to see if he was looking at her kissing me. He wasn't. (He was probably already off somewhere telling some other girl about the virtues of The Detroit Emeralds).

God, our generation was so bloody inept. Actually, I think it was probably just me.

And when I was 17 there was this hippyish chick who had the biggest round wire-frame glasses you've ever seen, and Wrangler denim loons that were that wide...she was like a really pretty version of Janis Joplin. I thought she was really sussed and cool as fuck.

I never, ever spoke to her - I was too scared - but one night she came up to me at the college disco (years later, I sussed that my friend Garry, bless him, must've gone up to her and did a "my friend kinda likes you" type thing, which took a lot of guts on his part, let me tell you...) and she said, looking like some sort of insanely sexy feminist, or a member of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang (an equally sexy concept in my teenage mind): "So, are you gonna buy me a drink, then, or what?"

I looked at her in mute astonishment. And said: "Hrrrmp...frrf...mrrgl..."

After about two minutes of me making hacking-up-furball type noises, she wondered off in those awesome, tight-fitting widescreen jeans of hers and never spoke to me again.

*sigh*

Not even an Isley Brothers album would've helped. I was pretty much beyond help.

I told Richard this story and he said "...like ships in the night, eh?"

We talked about loads of other stuff - some of it pretty interesting and funny - but darned if I can remember what it was now.

DOUGHSKULL DAVE

Baked n buried.

THIS MOMENTOUS DECREE

Just as this blog drifts into cosy, complacent middle-age, someone leaves some wonderfully apoclyptic spam in an old comments-box:

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Clearly some sort of weird Alt.Black Power vs Masonic Control Structure power struggle type narrative going on here. A subterranean/subliminal Control War for what? The rights to a posthumous Biggie Smalls album...?

Enormous golden clockwork pyramids emerge off the eastern U.S. seaboard, powered by lost Pre-Columbian tech salvaged from the crash-site in Chocolá, their heliophilic mirror-lasers auto-targeting L.A. Dead Aztec-mummy pilots still strapped in their terracota control-chairs...

In South Central, Killuminati sleeper-slaves awaken, opal-eyed, from modified-crack binges, their neural-nets rewired by smart-prions and begin building diy audio-weaponry from back-alley junk and discarded household implements...

Let the War of The Final Black Sun begin!

LIFE'S A RIOT

Right now, I'm feeling good, really good. Well, actually, I'm feeling lousy - some viral cold/flu shit - but, screw that: I'm feeling good.

Wild-cat strikes in the UK as the unions finally start to regrow their balls...

(the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons, I fear, with the spectre of nationism/protectionism/personal greed looming over what should ideally be a mass-assault on euro-explotative, lowest-margin capitalism. On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the 25th anniversary of The Miner's Strike - this is naive of me, I know - but should the TUC not also be supporting the struggles of workers outside the UK in a gesture of solidarity, not isolationism? We should be forging links with workers in the EU; pointing fingers at the bosses, not one another. British Trade-Unions and workers need to make some gestures that show that they stand for something other than mere petty self-interest...)

Riots and protests across Europe and Iceland and even Russia...

And now: the UK is covered in snow...

All we need now are some power-cuts. (I've got me candles all ready to go.)

Is this some weird re-enactment of The Winter of Discontent?

Some sort of staged Funded-Arts/Heritage Project...? A socio-politico-remix of the seventies?

Time to get dialectical, grow beards and huddle in cellar-bars and arts centres. We need some nihilist kino, some brittle, brutally complex, twisty, Brechtian polictico-prog as our soundtrack...

Here's how it used to be done:



(Slapp Happy/Henry Cow: "A Worm is At Work"

COLLAPSE V: THE COPERNICAN IMPERATIVE

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative is now available.

WOEBOT MIX

For those of you who missed Woebot's recent appearance on Resonance FM, here's a downloadable for ya to check.

And rather excellent it is too!