A brief shit on the floor to draw your kind attention to the continuing cruise through quality minds of
Filthy Pedro and his sacroscant Rock'n'Roll Points.
The fates have conspired to stake our Titan, Filth, our Prometheus, to the rocks. In bringing us his fire, his liver now feels the beaks of Channel Four and T-Mobile, hungry for his fresh bile and gory thoughts. Like dishevelled electricians, they crave his rock and roll points.
He can be seen sliding anonymously into a bath, vomiting on a girl's back, leaping in black pants from a man-soiled mattress on Channel Four's Transmission show each and every Friday night for the next wee while. But they do not credit his discovery, nor do they name the rake who has brought all this about. TV is a beast that shits where it thinks, and eats what it found on the grass.
It is the Filth! It is the Filth! Bring him rich and warm pickings, ye angels.
Let's keep this morsel of insight a balloon at the party, and rub it on our jumpers. News in a box with the corner ripped open and soggy with lazy suggestions.
Microscopic Cracks Found in Stepney Beer Barrels
18 Mehefin 2006, 19:48 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Great gobbling golden globes of distraction!
Bandages dripping in bad timing, we shuffle up to the plate and apologise. Literally dozens of concerned citizens have surrounded us at family barbecues and swinging sex parties, enquiring as to how our London gig ran its course. Like a confused river, we reply, edging away from the spatulas that seem so prevalent at both events; like a confused river, bobbing with aircrash victims.
But why the long faeces? There were jackals, pretty young leopards dancing interpretatively and with no small ooze; there were baubles in our eyes and pints in our necks; there was an arty swirl of Londonites with bagels on their breath, their attention a shimmering heat haze; there were wires, then more wires, then yet more wires; bags of wet sick hung from the ceiling like empty promises; there was about an hour of Hammer.
Pickpocket jive rang in the rafters of the gaolhouse in which we played. A microphone melted into the chatty ether. There was London uptightness all about our louche style: lock this now, stand there, leave then, eat this, not that. How do the lambs survive all this careful consideration? We stood with serrated thoughts and some irregular hair. DJ Welly played some lovely circles, teasing each tune over the line drawn in the sand by grumpy publicans, culminating in Polyteknikal science and warm reactions.
Then, the park. Frisbees, bikinis, no kids anywhere, some cheese, bikinis, sunshine, bare feet, topless Hammers, a little green space for thoughts to breathe - but no toilets.
Slowly and with oily intent, a thick German blanket of Weltmeisterschaft has benighted my brainwaves and fingers, and my fair keyboard has remained almost untouched by the future raining through. This might be a bad thing - it's difficult to make out the shapes. The windscreen is smeared with other noises, and the indicators are packed black with iron filings. Who knows where to put the bus shelters for our route? Hammers will cry thunder into the sky again soon. Keep your eyes vinegar sharp and your ears rhubarb keen.
Who knows what the heavy clouds will bring us?
London Flooded With Consequence
1 Mehefin 2006, 17:06 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Heads Up, Sophisticates! Here Comes Oblivions!
Last chance to unpent, whizzkids! Hammers are twitching at the holsters, ready to bring hot death to the complacent pigeons littering the streets of our Shining Capital. We are angels with fiery feet of love. We are the cowboys of the underconscious, bringing the herd right the way home. You can ask us anything you like. We've things to tell you. Musical things.
George Tavern, St Epney of the Eastenders, Llundain - Friday, 2nd June 2006 - 8pm or somesuch. We Hammers lie in wait, with sweat in puddles about.
Feel the heat in our tiny eyes...
Fat Drops Kill Deer in the Streets
Gwyl Banc y Gwanwyn 2006, 14:07 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Break out the hoovers, and let's suck this shit up!
Regret snakes about my solar plexus and puts its sticky fingers in my business. It's been a long time, compadres; stretching from then to now, with much detail to incorporate.
Firstly, Tall Amoral Parties. Failed, in truth, to bend my brainwaves into any new and exciting shapes. A surge of left-thinking, oddly pop rock too thick to leave much of a tidemark, perhaps. The darts that really hit home were the rock boys -
Dungen
freaked out on the Saturday afternoon like apprentice lions, then watched Pink Floyd Live from Pompeii early on Sunday morning and strolled about more contemplative gardens on their Sunday set, while Clinic sucked in the crowds downstairs.
Dinosaur Jr. were a noisy, gluttonous feast, blessed by angels. At one point, as the furies poured their beautiful fire at what seemed like maximal power, another gargantuan wail surfed in over the top at some hexadecimal volume so distant from 10 as to render the idea of numbers measuring sound ridiculous. 'Twas awesome; and ATP being the bowl without velvet ropes that it is, I got the chance to tell Mascis to his aged face how cool it was. (I think it probably had secretly occured to him already.)
The Black Keys played Holy Ghost to this triumvirate on Sunday night, kicking the blood pudding out of the air around them and making my head shake until brain damage clouded my thoughts.
Boredoms were also brilliant, but didn't quite write themselves into the story.
To shake the torpor from our feebled minds
and hearts, Delicate Hammers did indeed play a semi-disabled chalet set to a select crowd in conjunct with the flame-tongued principle Filthy Pedro. Ringo was in Paris, our devotable little keyboard (Casio the Modified SA2) was hung over with the gelatinous contents of a bottle of red wine still gumming his works - so it was not the full Hammermacht. But we made our presence felt, screaming about Belgium, throwing all the right shapes against the window, pulling blisters from our digits with the all the love the chalet could hold. Filth engulfed us Ourobouros-like with his legendary tales of the millenia he's spent on our planet, smoking gear with Gilgamesh, trading guitar licks with Charlemagne and snuggling Pope Joan. A palpable success!
This after Hot Chip had brought our stew to the edge of Valhalla with a great night at the Academy 3, proceeded by the irony-clad
Grovesnor who smokily laid some smooth keyboard grooves behind stories of illicit comference love, and followed by drunken shenanigans at Big Hands and beyond, which your humble correspondent is too ashamed to relate. An adrenalin-stained start to a promising weekend.
Before this again, our clocks whirling backwards to the time of unsliced bread,
Buck 65 rang stately peals over a shiveringly tiny throng. While this city managed to put on its party frocks for Der Chip, as Jove demanded, it could barely scrape together a few dozen to draw breath with the Wet Prince of Nova Scotia. Nonetheless he gave fireworks, manshaped magic and cracked Morphean stories of life for the greatest 65 alive.
Holy Fuck too were awesome-a-tronic! Must be something they put in Canadian burgers. Meat, perhaps?
Buckets at the ready, throw the sponge down!
Thousands Hear Lonely Dog Predict Future
17 Mai 2006, 14:05 - Hammer HQ, Mancholrton
Four fingers of musical fudge, plus a weighty thumb of intent.
A delicious week spreads before us, starting this very now, with a dessert of future Hammeraktion, sloppily glooping in the wings - something with lemons, meringue and gravel.
Index finger: Buck 65 tonight at the Roadhouse. No larger altar exists. There is a possibility that we will have danced with the elevator of chance once too often, and our ne'er-laid plans to pick up tickets at the door will collapse into a heap of bad glances, but what delights! In addition, Robin-Nature Bold and his Guitar(ism) has been safely snuggled onto the bill - a musical bandito of no small unease. Also some crowd by the name of Holy Fuck. Promises of entertainments are loud and threatening.
Bird finger: Hot Chip crowd into the Academy 2 on Thursday night. A mind's eye fills with every corner dripping with the genuinely beautiful people, raised once inch closer to the waking heaven they don't quite deserve; MancHeads turned inside out, showing the stitching on their tired second-head postures; single cell organisms linking in the fuggy air to form hyper-intelligent funk masterworks. The creative Chip tension 'twixt hop and fi, hip and lo should send out steaming geysers of lovely stuff. Hammers, Slinky and Polish are all very excited!
Ring finger: Lucky Parisiens, still shaking the reconstructive sawdust from their eyebrows after the Nazis, 68 riots and Da Vinci Code tourist cattle lorries, can finally welcome the Spring of History down the Champs d'Elysses with the glorious libertive entry of Polytechnic for a couple of gigs this weekend. In the unlikely event of anyone in France reading this at some point in the next few days, please break glass chandeliers and send a Bat signal into the brooding clouds. It's a Krautpunk field trip, but will Ringo get his lunchbox thrown in the river?
Puny finger: The Hammers will peck at London's shiny baubles again in only a couple of weeks at the George Tavern in occasional Stepney, Near East London, courtesy of the cyclical nature of birthdays and a collective thirst for our juice. We're like Stella for world beaters, you understand. We are in M*nch*st*r, but not of M*nch*st*r, and we come bearing vinyl gifts in the frame of DJ Welly, architect of nights of pulsing beauty.
A high class proposition, we're sure you'll agree. Our tiny cut-out ambitions stuck to bottom of our blank A4 lives as a reminder to any passing mortal that the impossible is always in a nearby cafe, enjoying chocolate. Do you think London sees M*nch*st*r as the tiny, little brother mirror version of itself that Mankers have always unconciously striven to be? The Eastenders bolthole for those characters not glamorous enough to head for the Costas?
Then the fat rainy thumb, ATP! The festive gathering of the forces of light on the carpet of eternal Mumm-Ra thirst. OK, so the bill continues to muster a pile of guitar sounds into an increasingly predictable corner of the imagination, but hey! we've a neophyte to throw on the vestal flames again this year - DJ Welly, Polish Dan, the A-V-ator! Lightning Bolt will set fire to our eyes with home-made electricity. Dinosaur will reduce the older faces in the crowd into floods of themselves, lapping at the teenage toes that once stood where they stand now. Dungen will embroider the things that should but never happened into our aortas for future reference. Marti Caine will swoop back from the Lethe to bring us some new and unheard faces, and chalet curtains will remain pointedly fastened.
And it will be raining, the cunts.
Doubts Crushed in Chariot Pile-Up
16 Mai 2006, 15:35 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Unicorns, gargoyles, permafrost, shopmobilities - all were made welcome!
There are larger and more resonant corners than this one, dear stray reader; but we've painted it imperial purple for the purposes of praising the enmightied Polytechnic.
Just as the Summer was beginning to dip her horny heads beneath the cloudy blankets for another month or year or so, we melted down all the past Poly crowns and smelted a ten-sleeved kimono of purest gold in which to wrap our heroes. A solid quarter of all citizens south of the Medlock were there, scraping the floor with their eager, clammy paws, making odd sexual growling noises at the back of their throats, and turning their spines into musical lightning conductors, with which to ground the Poly lightning fury and send it steaming into Hades. Let the dark, helmeted Lord of the Underdeep split his gates a crack so that these sweet jangles might warm the hearts of the damned and forgotten beneath our scented feet. What have the dead ever done to you, eh?
Atlantean support lay upon the burly shoulders of four-time-avian-name-champions,
The Nightjars, who twitched and retched as though staggering across a desert of their own ambition, pausing only occasionally to sip water from their cantinas and discourse with onlisteners. Bass strings were molested and shaped with delicate, breakneck precision; drumstick fragments showered generously into the unworthy eyes of rapt individuals; guitars belched like volcanic deities. It hanged together exactly like bad curtains don't. They're supporting The Longcut Thursday week, so go see that.
Academy 3 is such a beautiful place, with such a serial name - like Rocky movies. I cannot imagine enough trumpets to summon up the majesty of the Polytechnic gig that night. So we come again to the bizarre, unlikely metaphor. I
think I read a book when I was five that described this moment, vividly and in great detail - a book with illustrations of angry rivers, gangs of moss, caverns carved from the turds of long-dessicated dinosaurs, fire dancing like cheerleaders. If I could line up every lovely feeling I've ever had, they would stretch from one end of the evening to the other. And there were girls and women there such as to turn a blind man's fingernails into more eyes so he could look and yet not touch for the pain it would bring, arrowing though his digital nerve endings. Ringo felt the fingers of the gods of the future, digging their jazz nails in between his ribs so hard, he had to keep standing up between songs, buffeted by the sexual, salty wash of collective uterine longing and the curdled bark of deadly, pinpoint heckling.
Out of the mouths of babes, spews the intrinsic vomit of the future. It smells bad, but one tiny sip and the envelope of Things to Come gums you up, gathers you into his cosmic, star-sprinkled bosom; and you sleep the as-yet-unthought lives of a million unimagined soldiers of truth. The possibilities of every wriggling sperm you ever met written into the wool around you: world followers, lake dwellers, finch wrestlers, tiny whores, people who manufacture shimmering electropop, shop assistants, battery hunters, everyone that will have existed if everyone got lucky all of the time and we each had nine sets of balls and a dozen wombs. The Polytechnic spent their holidays, swimming, windsurfing and arm-wrestling in an ocean of this holy puke. They only touch the Earth by accident. Draw "P"s on your lawns, and they may visit while you sleep, and tip crazy, musical love into your skulls. Or they might be busy recording.
I'm thinking so hard and fast, all my paint's come off!
Mysterious Wailing Located to Old Trafford Backstreet
9 Mai 2006, 11:21 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
C'mon, feel the void!
Firstly, a piece of vinyl seven inches in diameter arrived in the post on Saturday and made me to cry with its warm rush. All hail the Lord Ringo for his merciful intercession with Mammy & Daddy at the record house!
Secondly, Master Egg will be reanimating the blow-dried mummified corpse of all things Jagger/Richards by leading some musical compadres through the desert of the Rolling Stones backlist this weekend at Salford University, acting as mattress and backdrop to a production of Joe Orton's The Entertaining Mr Sloan. Friday, 12th and Saturday, 13th, no information about cost or likelihood of full-on nudity. Master Egg is enigmatically excited about the whole project, and so are the rest of the mottled, liver-spotted Hammer functionaries here at the Towers. Make it a date(s)!
Thirdly, if on Thursday night you hear angelic brass blow full and rosily across the duskening sky, know ye well that Polytechnic have returned from their late Spring labours across our green, unpleasant land, chariots bepuddinged with teen gore and yellowing gush. Many miles of poker went into their experience - they suffered for your hearts. Now, you turtles, give them the Mighty Homecoming They Deserve and stuff your quivering flesh into the Academy 3, singing bawdy French poetry and re-enacting scenes from the lives of the Borgias in order to give an opulent, decadent hue to proceedings.
Fourthly (and with less satisfaction) I have in my hand the report card from Whose Hammers? return to the fray at
The House of Mr T and Restorative Janet in the Third Borough on Sunday night. (You know the Third Borough, the one with Altrincham.) Brass stars abound and swirl into an unhappy sandwich, sweet denizens of the interworld. Black marks fizz and nibble at our hopes and dreams. We are hunters and gatherers wandering in the foothills of bi
g, hairy, dreamy mountains, but that night little pieces of us starved and shivered for warmth in front of tiny fires. We've always pumped shonk, dear friends, but this time our hearts seemed to beat so thinly, that our blood barely moved. We were shadows, doppelgangers of our true selves. We needed to be rested against a wall and shot with dog venom until our ideas bucked and spasmed back into sustained life.
The crowd was small, friendly and familiar, and sang along at times. The minidisc decided to take revisionism into its own hands and forgot four or so of our backing tracks, which sawed off some of our enthusiasm. Songs concluded rather than finished, emptying into tangible voids of nothing before brave cheers and applause flung itself into the abyss to shore the evening up. Maybe their mouths were temporarily painted shut with awe. Maybe these dogs had shown their tricks often enough, and the pretty, sweet, whirring minds of the lads and lasses there assembled had brighter, shinier, dreamier ideas on which to dwell. Maybe all-night ping pong and dancing was not the ideal preparation, but since when did Delicate Hammers need to prepare in order to be? Oh, the questions, how they hulk!
Come June the 2nd and London's George Tavern, our retribution will be swift and lingering. Bring us your music and we will make it happen!
Not now, Mt Heart Attack!
Hanging Tough
27 Ebrill 2006, 13:08 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Break out the fresh balls, there are new crunts on the block!
My stylus is poised over the wax, and a new chamber of my brain enopened. Another sword of excellence dangling over the dirty, dirty soil of Manchorlton, where stand my stumps right now. (Disciples of stuff, I long for a laptop in
order to compose these missives from more exotic climes than these!) They are called Trailer Park, and fit the maxim - the neater the name, the more neat the music - quite neatly. We are so blessed in this brickworked corner of the
Mancopolis that even when Polytechnic are carried away from us by the Valkyries of CD-UK, another myth springs fresh to take their place. And sprang they did, at the Lounge on Wilbraham Road last night.
How to describe these lop-sided butterflies? Best done with words and sighing noises. They played with all of their fingers, sawing with cautious carelessness in and out of sync with their drum machine. Bass fidgeted heavily, guitar tinkled almost noiselessly, synthesizer swirled into ice cream. Akin to the pleasure of sliding ceramic tiles together and apart before the glue sets. My eyes look forward to seeing news of them playing again.
Incidentally, Delicate Hammers might actually be broadcasting their frequencies in a tiny way at The House of Mr T in glamourous Old Trafford, as he and his stand on the threshold of a new abode. No paintbrushes required. Sometime around 7th May. A report of our progress will follow. We've attempted a couple of times now to alert Rob da Bank and Producer Louise to our continuing musicmaking, stuttering as it is. But as yet, the tide of New Music (tm) has swept on despite us. Ah, me! We can but dream of sweeter biscuits yet to come.
The King!
Goat Gallivants in 12 Foot Ocean (Pics)
25 Ebrill 2006, 11:00 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Viral Fractals Snake Longingly Across Two Atlantic Continents
While the Goatboy is away (again), clogging up his financial arteries with yet more African adventure, tackling waves the size of mortgages, Ringo the Lord has been busy with his Polyboys. Or rather the world has been busy, slipping its tiny teeth into their musical beef.
The single has hit the racks of poorly-organised lives all over the country. So the vinyl I asked Transgressive for arrived as CDs (of which I already had!)! So the daft-arse new postbox that the dark landlords of the impossible have fitted to the bottom of Hammer Towers leaks and covered said CDs in dampness! That's not looking at the bigger canvas, is it?
A couple of beady voices have risen to proclaim their woozy views on the most double of b-sides. NME spat all both sides of the fence: Alvin & The Chipmunks? "Reverb"? "Alt-countryish punka-pop"? Hungry for balance and common sense, I looked for Melody Maker on the shelves, but some young wag at WHS told me that it had expired in a cloud of Fred Durst's anal waters and Millenial angst. What guff! Some time later, while relaxing in my own filth in the
musty segment of Hammer HQ dedicated to all things Cocular, I came across a review in the singles section of fortnightly trumpet,
Artrocker Magazine. Well, I wasn't quite THAT excited, if you catch my salty snowdrift; but some synapses were pleasantly jolted by the experience. "Instantly likeable melodies"? "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah"? Seems the Polytechnic safely navigate the coral-strewn straits of hype, in their Brighton opinion. Well, don't look at us: we've not put them on the cover of anything.
In more Hammerer news, your golden cherubs still wrestle with the logistics of yoking together the hairy hurtling comet of Ringo's career, the burning broody desires of Boomjet's jealous demands on Master Egg's digital watches, Loopol's Moroccan excursions and the sizeable, dressing-gowned lethargy of CocOen to carve out Hammerprodukt. Korova still calls. London has planted a sticky thumb on the first weekend in June, so assemble your diaries, ye Metropolitan cohorts! Irby-on-the-Marsh in monstrous Lincolnshire has also staked a drinking straw through our hearts and pinned us to its Irbstock manifest destiny
on the 12th August. Pure, crystalline tears of information will drop from our bleary eyes as soon as it is ordained. Keep your neurons crossed!
There are no (pics), fools!
The Filth Spreads Sweetly Like November Snows
13 Ebrill 2006, 11:22 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Thirty years of strategic boardgames begin to bear horrible, horrible fruit.
Filthy Pedro is poised to scoop us all up in his hot, sulphurous hands and mold the world into a giant antfarm, chemically regimented to throw perpetual praise in his unholy direction.
Firstly, he has unleashed the irritant gremlin bullet with which all future weekending guns should first be loaded - The Rock 'n' Roll Points EP. This handily-sized plastic object contains within it enough anti-folk attitude to detonate a small cornershop: from the scuzzy, persistent majesty of the titular tune, through a simple explanation of exactly why he left the Isle of Shitty Druids, unto a closing prayer for a good night out on the pilly lash. All Filthy life is there. You can obtain it from his virtual house
here.
Secondly, he has slunk out a sneaky tenticular prong onto the printed media, smearing his quotable dust across the pages of
Nude magazine and laying the table with what has gone on in his antifolk head these last couple of years. Read it, before the dead swans of history carry his words away into the underpast.
In other news, the double B side debut of Our Dear Polytechnical Bwoys sits squarely on the shelves of all right-thinking recordshops
come Bank Holiday Monday. It's the sound of golden tears wrung from April's clouds, and again there's a stable on the interweb where the beast is housed -
Transgressive Records!
One absent minded cybersniff and a shiny cataract of double-sided vinyl
will torrent through your living quarters. Just imagine the giddy rush!
The glittering youths that run the label are also appearing on a MTV2 SXSW
report this weekend, sprouting up and down The Sixth Street with gibbering
cameras. It might feature some sweaty party Poly Texas action from their
afternoon tea and guacamole party. And Poly Pete may make a historic
spoken appearance. Wasps will start with the unexpectedness.
Polytechnic are the next 10cc!
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