Herb Alpert Stabs Mother of Nine Over War Memorabilia
31 Mawrth 2007, 23:21 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
It's all gone very, hasn't it?
Please excuse the smell, we've had the swine in, shitting their green innards all over the corners, leaking their stinky pink dandruff on the furniture. As a result, it smells pretty bad in here. We're seeing March out in a very shabby style, with soup in our lungs and bread in the back of our molars. Fillings like bullets. A picture painted wearily with bark-like brushes. Flies eating our vomit.
We brushed the lizards aside to bring you the latest, and late it verily is. Two weeks have sloped by, lazily flapping their palsied hands in our direction, by way of greeting; we ignored them. Our legs have roamed eagerly across the cool bed sheets, avoiding the damp patch where the April Hug was meant to be; a towering, spermazoidal lake of billions, slowly crusting and turning to salt. Bad juju has nibbled on our spines, cracking open tiny feasts with its flinty dental legion. We have news, mealy in our mouths and arid in our imaginations.
Millions of seconds passed in no particular order. The Czech Bar was thoroughly colonised by urgent uncertainty. It was a twisted, empty cramp of an evening, due largely to the dumb, flapping brains of those assembled. Sparks scattered themselves before us, set smouldering by the good ship Billy Ruffian, sidling up the corner of their minds with cheap red wine, cheap red blood and cheap red anger. Why did they seem younger than I'd imagined? As I watched, a big fat stroke inched across my face, a stroke of genius.
Hammers, Hammers... We're like a wriggling bird at times, a parrot biting off its own beak to slap its face. We are our own big brother, kneeling on our shoulders, launching open-fisted cracks against our wincing cheeks.
Paddy Hug was such a night of underwhelming stricture. The sound was a little billowy, and Coc Oen blew his tubes so completely, that his voice was an oily rag three songs before the end of the set, and his stomach was mahogony with the effort of squeezing every cubic centimere of noise out of his body. A singing, ringing tree, he was, with all his branches agape. Some noisy, bloat-headed footsoldier of the apocalypse made bull elephant noises through his misshapen hole of a face. People played pool. Poison moved quietly around.
Then, Misterlee plugged in;
the main event, the high street voucher, the chicken royale with extra mayo and a reading lamp. He had songs, but he wanted to humiliate them for us. Bully and snarl upon them until the cheap, shiny fabric fell away, and the black, raw
fluids inside seeped out like cherry brandy from a misshapen licqueur. He
stood on his voice, using pedalled boots to squeeze the sinews, tickle the
sherbert fountain one more time. He looped over and back, building a
graven image of himself with which to taunt wobbly reflections. A xerox of
a xerox of a xerox of an identikit drawing in the back of his mind. Cave
paintings with neon trim.
But fast! The
evening's chief glory has passed
almost without historical notice. Peter "Inhuman Trust" Thrust, a man
more magical magpie than simpering urban pigeon warrior. He carved a
notch into the universe and used it as a foothold to throw burning lactose in
our eyes, plucked from the quivering throat of undead rabbits. He drew
pictures, labelled "Twat", of the world he saw around him, a squinting,
gargling world with guts for garters, then drew lachrymose miracles from its
paper eyes. His hand cut chunks of jazz out of the space-o-sphere,
sending them fizzing like gigantic steaks to form new continents in bespoke
galaxies, screaming for his quantum touch. There was no end to his
talents, as surely as there was no beginning. The magic ourobouros,
Peter Thrust, bit his tail to show us where he lived and where the pain
belonged. You think I'm making this up? There was a floating
baguette, for the love of Mike!Fibre in my trousers, old man. As
wheat to the mill.
Driveway Gravel Contains Kernel of Human Joy
15 Mawrth 2007, 13:36 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
(Dang! Forgot to listen to that Tom Waits show on Radio 3 last night!)
Yet another installment of the Group Hug adventure spins its way endlessly through space towards us. This time, we've pushed the burning funereal boat out so far that the attendant mermaids have nosebleeds. Sharks have been attracted to their sanguine scent and a thrashing, fishy battle has begun for the future. What chaos our enthusiasms engender, eh?
After a submarine Hammer warm-up at a delightful bash last Saturday, Jabez Clegg thick with costumed ladles and jellyspoons, and one spectacular
air hostess/sunken aircrash combo catching our particular attention, comes the Hour! Gird your minds with hot, steel rivets; a skyscraper of ideas rises before you and fingers the skyline.
In addition to more patented confusing delight from Y Forthwylion, we have invited and arranged a talented triumvirate to bend and break your preconceptions like cheap metal spoons. (Unless your preconceptions are almost precognitively accurate. In which case, please accept our cowed apologies.) Firstly
Billy Ruffian carve crazed lovespoon after lovespoon in an attempt to put across their message of literate, rock'n'roll man-angst. They also do music. Which band will turn up, eh? The spoons or the guitars? Then a truly magical interlude of showbusiness proportions, when sequinned dandy magicisto Peter Thrust throws his illusionist gauntlet hard in the face of the unbelievers.
Finally, our third tripod surprise is
Misterlee, a collection of ne'er-do-averages from the wanton and wartorn borough of Leicester, who stretch their psychic damage long in the novelty mirror and make loud, dark, brown music. Steve Albini is their Dad; and he's spread a paternal ear over their sound, prodding it with paternal fingers, manhandling it into his recording box. How unfragmentedly cool is that? The Pharaohs of indie
substance will drop their pop when they witness, and decide to let our non-generic people go.
It's all been fish and chips so far at Group Hugs, you wouldn't want to bring the mushy peas down on us now, would you?
Spontaneous Indigestion Cut By Half
22 Chwefror 2007, 12:17 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Saturday is as Saturday does.
The hand has fallen from the tiller, friends; fallen in a puddle on the floor. Our cranial cave paintings have taken on such a dusky, lustrous hue that we have almost begun to believe our own gloomy legends of stags like bulldozers and woolly mammoths butting with double deckers. There was a city, and a snowy tundra, but as to which was when and how, we are lost.
A fallow time for your Hammers, a sizeable gap between Hugs, no gigs or practices from January to March. A great, gulping breather, oxygen smashing our faces in. And we have been remiss in keeping you up to date with the recent developments.
Goat Hug was a glistening success, promptly scattered by Zeus into the night sky and immortalised in brand new star systems, as yet untouched by the Star Trek franchise. It was something of a hard-won evening at times, but always a party, always a celebration, and it reached long and lustily into the pre-dawn murmurings. Music was supplied by a specially-carved handful of CD-Rs. What was lost in sheer vinyl magic was gained in intermittent good plastic juju. No Jeru The Damaja on vinyl, for example; and what bleary avenues would we be taking without his toothy wisdom?
Seven Sisters put their feet to the treat first. Delightfully nervous, spitting their tightrope, rumbling chants with arms akimbo and vintage clothing worn at a jaunty angle. Their neglected charm pulsed out and arrested many of those there dissembled, not least a staggering Hulme resident who decided he wanted to talk the ladies inbetween numbers. He made one or
two appearances, in fact, and may find a home in the Group Hug pantheon via some promotional literature. I'm not sure how firmly we should rattle the bear's cage, but let's all see, eh? The Sisters strode purposefully forward, dragging Ringo in to pluck a few strings on a guitar and put together the kind of solo that he eschews consistently in his Hammer role.
Bossing the midfield next was Ed "Master of Puppets" Barton, fuzzy with barley-field beard and out of his weather, throwing aside the cheap rock & roll wiring of some previous shows, and putting his thumb in his poetry book instead. There were some battles with the Hulme Residents Assocation, as tales of stolen dogs were misinterpreted by drunken Scots, and the limelight was briefly abandoned within a right-thinking shimmer of impetulant resignation. But eventually, the cabaret element of the crowd discovered their voices and their hands, and the night was turned around. Tables were climbed. All closely resembled what was right with the world, even if it wasn't the brassy glory I had dreamed about.
Next to the washing up bowl, and criminally unannounced by the crumpled compere, as he thought he may have already started, was
Tommy Walker III, a former Hug champion and mouse-handler, his white hot, glowing laptop lashing out piles of partytastic, bladder-burning bangers and mashed. Slumped and concentrated as always, a granite-browed giant of the silicon valleys.
Then cake. Then MoominTron & The Moomins, otherwise known as publicity-shy, commercial Colossi POLYTECHNIC! Civic memorials noted that they'd never seen such a lively performance by the krautpop cowboys. They could not keep still, swaying and slotting upwards and backwards and returning again like a fascinating
human nickelodeon, or a steam engine powering a beautiful, noisy pianola. There have been many venues that had felt the wash of Polytechnic on their carpets by now, but never have they seemed more like a bar band than that festive February night. There was a thick sheen of sweat across the backs and foreheads of many present, not least the Lord Ringo, and the sound over our cobbled public address system was raw like stir-fried vegetables, still packed with sweet, fibrous goodness. The honky tonk Moomins played a couple of new tunes, soaked older ones in delicious, rambling intros, turned one over to the steel-pointed, line-dancing disco, and set about the particles about them with wave before wave of nuclear progression. Peet's fingers are pushing into the DNA of the band now, a dirty uncle with evil intent incestuously bringing out a hesitant demi-god, stitched into a wobbly, vein-marbled thigh for later reference. A heady, heady night.
Then the night repaired to drinking, beer arriving in vans, arthritic dancing, discos in the kitchen, a touch of Lee Marvin, standing in the corridor talking about lapels, a girl from the fish shop in leopard-print dresses, hangover preparation on a bile-revealing scale, and a gradual admission that the fun was over for another lifetime.
It's not a straight story. We can't drive a tractor cross country to the point, taking in sweeping vistas of well-thought out imagery, because the clever bits in our minds do not like sustained output. Slot machines where there should be Cold War supercomputers, throwing out glowing references for the global impact of this and that, sketching out a million scenarios in flowery, poetic jargon. It's not like that,
it's like bells and cherries and blackjack in pub carpets. My brain is wet and black and smells like fetid potatoes.
A famine hounds the pillared, chessboard floor where Apollo spins golden apples
on his fingertips and plots the bright trajectory of the intellectory.
Need I
go on?
Incident: Take a look at NME this week and spy another rusty blemish on the Polytechnic's misunderstood reputation. Every review they get seems to be chipping against some monolith built by others in their image, but if nobody thinks they
fit the catsuits of the hype, then whence the hype? And whom the
tailors?
Man Shits Post Office
1 Chwefror 2007, 21:55 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Come on, kids, let's do it for the Goatboy!
Moomin rumours!
Jack Frost Found Hanged In Cell
18 Ionawr 2007, 16:36 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Another few salty chips locked into the grimy treasure chest for leaner times.
Focus pulls back to show Delicate Hammers sunning themselves on an aluminium sheet, t-shirts correctly sloganed, jumpers now forgotten accessories like fobwatches, water trickling through the cracks in the wall; the calendar reads January 2008 and the world still waits for Winter.
A lonely mosquito circles the bedroom, announcing, like the good psychopomp it is, the early Summer the Ha
mmers have brought to the world and never allowed to slip. Pausing for tiny breath on the sweaty wallpaper, the insect whispers the song yet to be sung. CocOen can barely hear so moves his ear closer. Then crushes the little punk. My blood for the future? No dice.
A shimmering reverie takes hold and the Hammers are back one year, flicking switches at the Satellite Club one barely chilled January Wednesday evening. There were a few artpups grouped around tables, discussing and ingesting, but they were a natty bunch.
Becca Williams began by clearing her throat and belting out some neat, bluesy acoustic devil ballads. She was not a nonagenarian Bluesman, but she was a good listen nonetheless.
Hammers had always assumed that the acoustics in the Lounge were a truly horrible dimension to the night. We were wrong. That Wednesday, we were plying our trade in the greatest bathroom the world has ever heard. Phil Specter has made an appointment that once he's dead, he will spin in his grave. Fast and loose shot the Hammers, and the shonk flew thick. As we deftly unthreaded our oeuvre, and sprawled musical marbles across the floor, our listening friends hooted and booted with more and more excitement. Oasis were stuffed and mounted on a bed of sunshi-i-i-i-ine, the gaps between songs grew longer and longer, claims were made about God and Eddie van Halen that should not be repeated. Life was a cabaret, my friends. If the Janus Hug performance was a cover drive, this was a reverse sweep that took a thick top edge and flew over the rope. Then hit some monobrowed dickhead in the face and knocked his front teeth out.
Yes, that's what happened.
Rapture Postponed Due To Lack of Interest
18 Ionawr 2007, 14:56 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Rheumy eyes lift from YouTube long enough, as the world becomes a clearer area.
Now that the diurnal has been restored: Master Egg waving his instructural stick strictly in a vocational training context, Ringo spilling his vertiginous nosebleeds over the rising
Polytechnic shelf, Goatboy building art to wobble the world, and CocOen sluggishly cruising the internet for pictures of hypnotized Spanish actresses; now the routine has slotted back in, the time Jacob Colour Studios burned bright seems almost unknown. But happed it did, friends!
Little Dan came, he barked his orders, then cloaked himself off into the Tuesday night, leaving behind a few granulated slashes of the eternal and Guiness rings on the kitchen table.
Cables ran like Caucasian oil pipes through our brains, the cavernous remains of throat infections were attacked with honeyed fruits teas and bulbs of garlic, work was safely removed from the equation, except in Goatboy's case. He had to labour hard to create a grey blank version of a Salford shopfront street before bursting in to throw his weight in our faces. For the rest of us it was a holiday bootcamp on the shores of Lake Makearecord, complete with afternoon sojourns to the pub and takeaway meals. Little Dan was subjected on Tuesday morning to hold back a throbbing hangover while contested with a small rugby scrum of Cocoens, growling their dark desires in his ears. Manfully, he coped and commandeered.
The unorganic produce of our domestic union can be heard in part on our MySpurt page. It is called "Horror Hammer?", although the pesky technoids at Spurt Central in the Porn Valley do not allow our punctuation. They fear the seductive curl of the question mark and its weighty, meaty dot. Californicators! Without wishing
to curdle any expectations you may have, I lay a few choice descriptive words at your screens. From up high in our palatial turrets, we look down and see a beaufiful, vivacious woman striding enigmatically across the painted streets below. At this moment, the Hammer voice is rent in twain, one half scurrying down the brickwork to the street in direct and forceful action, eating a meat and potato pie and sketching out his brainwaves in the asphalt. The second rolls about on warm, shaggy, blood red carpets in its presidential boudoir, hired hands lushly sweeping string sections in the damper corner of the room, tear-stained maps of Belgium on the rosy walls before breaking down in viral confusion. These two ghostly chancers never meet again.
When will our insistent Day in the Life split finally get itself out of our system, so we can leave this lysergic, two-faced
mirror world behind and start writing songs to bring iPods to Africa? Sting, we invoke your tantric, madrigal wisdom! Show us the way, dark PE-teaching wasp lord!
The other number is called "R's & H's" (this time passing English teachers taking exception at our punctuation) and is our newest tune, untouched even by Lord Ringo. We could tell you it's a layer cake of nagging vocals, thick-fingered guitar moronism, yet more twisted longing for the creamily female and high-belted zombie narrative, where the outside is actually the inside and we shop at synapses instead of supermarkets. Or we could leave you to make up your own opinion sandwiches.
Waiter, waiter, there's a thigh in my loop!
Doorway to Top Shop Blocked by Massive Wad
18 Ionawr 2007, 12:39 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Group Hug is back, headwads, and it's bringing the shonk back into Manshonkchester!
There are still softening carcasses scattered in bizarre fractal patterns within a mile of the Czech Bar, almost an exact mile radius. Squirrels, chaffinches, pigs, nu-metallers, cucumbers, house cats - all their bellies swelling, sweetly slipping out their dead gasses, untouched, laying precisely where they fell, confused and fatally undone. Manchester City Council has been informed. The contagion bit hard and was blind in its merciless taint.
Fingernails are already slanted towards Delicate Hammers, voices jagged in our direction, our carpet thick with accusations. We are the blame. But what a night it was, traveller; what an
applied noon of ambition!
It began subtly with an Iggy Pop record, turning round and round, but soon it was joined by other records, other music. Before long, The Man Called
Quip began coaxing closely-woven shards of another country from his laptop and distressingly beautiful pieces of kit. At first, these national addresses were hefty and sparked in the wrong places, the transition from guitar/drum soundcheck to lone cable streamlining jumped straight into without caution. But soon, all manner of hard-surfaced delights scattered and pogo'd out across the bar. His country was a benign dictatorship, glittering medals hanging from the eyelids of a droopy populace. The police wore mirror shades and charged about on mechnanical horses, searing the air with laz-rifle bolts. He was somehow putting his money where his heart was.
Then after some more terminal vinyl was frisbeed out headlong towards the abyss, including The Butthole Surfers' Hurdy Gurdy Man, which has not been heard in many a dusky sunset, your humble Hammers punched out a 30 minute set to extra cover. Whap! Already the finer details have been lost, not due to drink for once, but the fuzzy
clipping of the experience, the enormity of the processing required taking off the edges like a rusty mic. We had Ringo; we had an audience enthusiastic, loyal and novice in parts; but we had an extra gift brought to us by the god Janus: doublesight. We were in the moment and the cheeky moment was in us. We were stood in a massive rotting whalehulk, bare ribs towering over us in orchestral magnificence, hunks of musical yesmeat swinging from eviscerated spinal discs. Faces magnified by a curious optical illusion, hands throwing out more fingers than we could count on, we were as unicorns in the forest, phallic and virginal, animal and mineral. Flames licked out our brains, steam powered our thoughts, the wallpaper clambered sloopily off the walls, the wood floor warped its approval, and the departure lounge was over. National debts melted away and we were slung onto the shoulders of an albatross.
More heavenly padding from recorded music, before
The
Generalissimos came and locked our ears in tiny claustrophobic boxes. The Beatles had got in a fight with The Ramones over bandnames, several chords were broken, an arpeggio gouged out, and all the damaged music trumpeted itself in front of us, the gaping audience. The air was thick with the sound of lovespuds au gratin, astral meteors of bass hurtling into the crowd, whirring metallic circles of guitar fury. These lumbering xylophonic beasts have much to tell us about the insides of their minds, Withingchester has been declared a Ungone Zone. The kids have freaked up so hard as they walked by their big house that their childhoods have ruptured and spilled the murky past all over their new skinny-fit trousers. How do you get rid of family holiday at the seaside stains?
Then there was a disco, reluctant to end, featuring Franco-Swedish breakdancing ladies, some more dusty non-hits from the early nineties, a few more drinks (some of them green), until finally Lee Marvin growled out Wand'ring Star and it was time to go home.
What more can be said? As the ash and charred bone is swept into the beer barrels for another time, the pulsing beginnings of the next Group Hug throw out their tiny vein-like throngs.
Destiny has thrown in its royal flush and all we can do is wait. We are all biscuits on the edge of a chocolate sea.
Bowel, please, Carol.
Cold Virus Rots Cathedral, Bishop Suffocated
11 Ionawr 2007, 15:37 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Kick the dust from out our noses!
We are choked by the weed-like deeds undone, thick thorny brambles of rambling ideas unrealised. Our own only hope now is a viral marketing by ear, nose and mouth. The world will sneeze in cinemas to spread our holy contagion. Yes, the time has come all too quickly to promote another Group Hug, another appearance from Yer Hammers.
As we type, preparations are in hand for a busy January for the Hammers.
First, on Saturday...
Then our Hugbuddies
The Generalissimos have asked us to contribute something to an Unsigned CD for the splendid jukebox at Chorlton-'pon-Medlock's drinkerie, Sandbar. Another excuse to take drink there, yeah! Not sure what tune we might trade with destiny, but Gaz500 fancies "The Biggest Man With The Crying Hands". The tale of an unhappy champion sheep, feeling the weight of expectation on its woolly shoulders, stuttering its way across afternoon drinkers. That tickles the widgit alright.
This weekend, stubby recordnik enthusiant Little Dan touches down from liminal Leicestershire to bring his barking, growling skills to sink our ships into some kind of underwater flotilla formation. We will record two tracks and sometime before April, fuse them to vinyl and smear south coast luminary slumberjacks
True Swamp Neglect on the other side, then pepper the fields and hedgerows of the Tidy Albion with our desire.
On Wednesday, codename January 17th, we will cut the smoggy air with a pre-recorded drumstick at the Satellite Club in the anti-swanky Lounge Bar in Chorlton on Wilbrahahahhahahhahaahham Road. This usually involves a lot of shouting and uninterested drinking, so we will be quietly daring in our commando raids on their collective opinion. A bustling colony of activity it will probably take us the rest of the year to recover from.
The Group Hug programme is extending, Star Wars prologue style, into the next few months. For the Goatboy's birth canal in February, and to celebrate St Patrick's in March, and then perhaps a Single-Release Hug in April with those tentative Swamp thugs. Hmmm, oscillate the factors, ya chumps!
Live wrong and bluster!
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