Video Evidence for Existence of Nonagenarian Christ Found in Accidental Cloakroom
28 Medi 2006, 9:41 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
My eyelids burning from the labours of those nights before...
OK, OK, so the fax machines were still, aching awkwardly on the yawning beach, dribbling their fax noises in lieu of the salty, solid touch of the news ocean. We apologise for the break in transmission, the bloody wound of information regarding our entertainment activities. We Hammers crept noiselessly through the Manchorlton evening last Saturday, then drove our mallets home with a heedlessly noisy set at Playtime.
The feverish anticipation had lead breadcrumbs to this night, brains were agape: the full Hammers re-united, the Four Traffic Lights of the Apocalypse - Stop, Wait, Go and Ooops, Sorry! After a couple of unseasonably tight rehearsals we felt ready as snowmen to don oxygen masks and clamber for the summit of our own endeavours once more. Our crampons were dewy with sweat.
Nervelessly, we watched the recruits file in during the sets from
Mug (noisy, noisy cider boys) and
Star Crossed Lovers (touching indie from a cosy distance). Hard to think we were topping the bill, and yet... And yet... Downstairs, United gritted their soft teeth against that sinking feeling; upstairs, our own jaws stiffened and our throats were ragged with viral interferences.
The hour was sped by drink, with which we sprinkled down our winking spasms.
We hit the stage like a shopping trolley bursting with
vegetables - burning,
independent broccoli; zucchini licked by filthy angels; earthy, misshapen
potatoes imbued with the power to read intestines; angry, angry carrots.
Every sip was ambrosial. Every stitch falling from a beautiful gypsy's knickers. It felt sweet 'n' heavy to be full in the compliment again.
And the Playfolk danced! We'd never seen them dance to the bands before.
"Horror Hammer?", our Beligian number, finally put its bricks together in the
outside world, its cement sliding out the edges and suckled on by lonely dogs.
Such a nest of such lovely chickens, such a delicious wobbly drunken blur.
A legion of gratitude to all the centurions that made it happen. Elysium
awaits every single one of us with fantastic, perfumed sex and food that would
kill lesser digestive tracts. The night has faded fast. Where are the details?Thank you very little.
And what in the diseased
imagination of Satan are cop cards?
What's That Coming Over The Hill? Is it a Group Hug?
15 Medi 2006, 12:16 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Yes, it's a Group Hug!
3rd November 2006 - Carlton Club, Whalley Range, Manchester - See More Details for Here Later!
Father Time Steroids Shocker!
5 Medi 2006, 10:00 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Militant hamsters are taking arms to aid Cher in her struggle!
Crypticisms dropping like October apples right now, eh chums? Not much time, but a quick share and display re: the recent Polytechnic travels.
Leeds saw them face off against the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which was a raw shame, as les garcons de polytechnique played a beautiful set, glorious shining badger following shimmering brock brother ambling into the damp evening air. The new waltzy number, the title of which as yet unknown to your correspondent, sounded especially majestical.
In other news, the Polyboys rejoin and revive the hottest of Spring tickets in October as they kiss the salty tarmac of Mother Britain with surburban titans The Young Knives. This triple-distilled blend of magic will only be available at the southern end of our united isle, unfortunately for us Hyperborean types. A great night awaits many hundreds, hopefully thousands of people.
Ringo also bundled back into Manchorlton yesternight, giddy with the fumes of a completed recording session up in the gloomy Bethesda region, which smells like dental mouthwash and pubs with Welsh names. Some tinkering to be done, mixes to be proferred, a single hoisted sometime in misty October - the oily rumblings of back-of-house showbidness - but gobbets of the future have been committed to magnetic life! The pitter patter of tiny albums is expected some time in March. (Expect them to come up with a title at the end of February.)
To the slippery ghost of the present, and all its lovely gifts!
Sardines Clog Distant Beach
31 Awst 2006, 15:30 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Aces! Aces! Aces!
Last night saw a tiny platoon of white-faced Band(ista)s stand serially and out of number before another Band(ism) experience at the Life Cafe, on dribbly Peter Street. This was to love, honour and obey the committing to digital video of images helpful to the promotion of "Peacock (Mk 2)", which will be spored into the air sometime at the end of October. Loop and Coc were there, Master Egg regrettably absent, Ringo still in the mountains: and a reasonable amount of fun was had by all. Band(ism) continue to catch onto waves of snarling art, sporting their shiny new Suxxexx components, climbing over furniture, swirling mopheads with balletic grace. No photographic evidence has been uncovered as yet, but in addition to the clicking and whirling of a thousand videoscopes, a painting was created to seal history's sluttish lips around the deal.
There will be another glimpse of Band(ism) permitted on 7th September at Night & Day, so if you have a natty white outfit you've been aching to see recorded on some hard drive somewhere, you know where to go. We wore an intimidating pair of white aprons. More information can be taken visually and aurally
here .
There were also some fat, lumpen would-be punks rolling bad noises around their mouths, stamping their feet like bulbous wrestlers and sounding like the house band for the IRA's mid-70s pub bomb campaign - moribund, dour and belonging in a past best forgotten. In two words: shite.
Take yours balls in hand and run with them through the night!
Cure Found For Decade's Recycled Decrepitude
18 Awst 2006, 10:38 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
In a Lincolnshire field we glimpsed several different flavours of green-shooted future, knowing the tips will sour but drinking in the scent.
Your Hammers have committed some unnatural act - somehow growing a new skin while sloughing the older exoskeleton into a neatly folded suitcase for future use. Delicate Hammers, v4.1 has been unleashed, rubber-stamped and ironed out for kinks. Irbstock was first to witness this quake of history, our fellow Manchorltonites hungrily witnessing the bold triumvirate of Egg, Goat and Coc and jollily swinging the bells of approval in our faces.
This does not draw the line under the "classic" 
Hammerformation of Ringococloopegg, for that would be a crime against the misty future. Instead, the tinier trio are now able to sleekly slip into crevesses and cracks in schedules too large for its bulkier forbear - holes in the carefully-guarded corridors of physics, wherein Stuchbury cannot
inhabit two places at once. But the eight-legged shronk machine will send its klangering footsteps ringing through the halls of musical diversion again!
Irbstock involved a lot of rain. Most of it falling from the sky; a lot of it settling on tents, seeping into clothing and dampening the temper. Seemingly crippled by our errant stringsmith, fingers broken by a complete absence of any practice or re-arrangem
ent, festive spirit leaking into the dull pools infusing our shoes, we could not see where the Hammermagik would spark and channel. How full of cloud our eyes and ribs had been! The magic was coiled there all along; a tiny polychromatic dragon with coral gills, chewing on its emerald breakfast, nestling between the lyrics and remaining notes.
Our
Hammerbuddies sponged the love that ignited the draconian bonfire. Master Egg stood powerful in glistening wellies, his eggy
frame visibly pulsing with centuries of accumulated knowledge, translating
itself before our very eyes into a beautiful totality. Coc managed to wear three
jackets at once, each conferring on him a different skill - a saucy guitar nymph
even licked his fingers with the ability to play his retarded songs with fuzzy grace and stand on the pedal at the right moment for once. Loopol flexed his sinewy vocal cords with expert dexterity, ripping the strings from his instruments
in a similar intense fashion and expanding outwards to fill the occasional void.
All in shiny all, Delicate Hammers are back and the crumbly earth smells like
daffodils.As especially fragrant grasses strewn at the feet of the crowd before our tight apotheosis, our succession of
schoolkid rock bands constructing cunning replicas of hits of the day, by the likes of Red Hot Chillipeppers, Arctic Monkeys and other pencilcase heroes. There was a horrible reanimation of a couple of Grease numbers, which carved a cold, jagged lightning despairing through my chest, but these were easily outweighed by a stirringly ramshackle version of
Hounds of Love a les Futureheads and a quite brilliant mess of a Wonderwall, an atonal bassline accidentally lending the whole sorry piece of Manc doggerel a post-punk majesty that I could
spend years of my life trying to replicate. One such bunch of teen auteurs were called
The Underdogs, dewy fresh from Hope Valley, but the topless, sylvan spirit of The Slits must have crept in through their backdoors somehow. You may feel a rumbling bassnote of sarcasm behind all this, but your bodies deceive you: these scraggy bands really were great. A beautiful, shonky structure of aspiration, enthusiasm and kiddy aggression blocking out the glaring sunshine of technical proficiency. Or something.
The shivering delight stumbled on through the night as Polish Dan (DJ Welly Wobble) and CocOen exchanged vinyl high-fives, occasionally having to draw ourselves to a halt while the acoustic tent strained to make itself heard. Some of the segueways bent the stars to our brows and La Ritornelle in particular probably never sounded more perfect to my ears.
Revitalised and shot through with fresh vigorous intention, D. Hammers, esq. have re-mounted their efforts, a semi-rigourous campaign of weekly rehearsals and exploration have been decreed and whispers of a vinyl release in the Autumn have been issued from our pursed lips. In place of the square, in absence of the pentagon, the triangle sears into our brainflesh, and its glow is mighty hot. A couple more gigs have materialised - at Playtime in Chorlton and another in conjunctio with Ed Barton. More details as the scales fall from our own eyes.
Art + rock = Artrock!
Newsstands Thick With Filthy Trumpets
17 Awst 2006, 11:55 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
It's dripping from the rooftops like a
treacly,
infamous spunk!
As the weak dawn ripped delicately through my consciousness this morning, a promise loomed large in my swollen synapses: a promise I had made to myself as a younger man the evening before.
Another buddy had trouser-pressed his way into the Express That Delivers Soiled Musical News In The Form of Waxy Words, that King's Reach Tower publication. (Ah, the King's Reach Tower - home to Tharg and his dusty, inky droids during the halcyon years of 2000AD!) And I swore to myself that freshly-ended night, that I would go out and buy myself a picture of him in that paper and read what they had to say about him.
Filthy Pedro (for 'tis he!) is somewhat enigmatically flattened and profiled on this week's page 18, brought to a wider awareness by Xfm's indie queen bee, Lauren Laverne, and accompanied by a photo with the traditional wrestling mask whilst (appropriately) wrestling an acoustic guitar to the grubby carpet.
Huge crystalline clocks have rolled around to this moment with a healthy precision, as this weekend, Filthy hits his strut as part of the Anti-Folk Summer Festival in the oily heart of London's decrepid West End - the 12 Bar on Denmark Street. It's a small basement with walls the colour of Neanderthal blood paintings, but a diverting way to spend a handful of your waking hours and no mistake.
Maybe there's hope for Xfm after all! (But probably not the Manc one.)
Postscriptum: Having carelessly tossed the waxy rag aside, my lust for Filth
sated, I missed that the Polytechnic Pep had been chosen as "2nd Single of the Week", after the
pop-riddled Trousersnake's opus singlus, with a charming photo of the lads looking as though they were preparing themselves for a front-room international Risk tournament. Which maybe in a way they are. This time the languid comparisons have moved forward six months in the Big Book of What's Hot in US College Rock from Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah to Tapes 'n Tapes; but angry fairground organs, indie-tsunamis and Social Sciences at Lampeter get closer to capturing the big-wreaking deceptive cheer of this monster. Monday sees the CD hit the shops. Buy it in barrel-loads, you monkeys!
Amnesiac PC Destroys Grubby Heartland
11 Awst 2006, 13:30 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Balance of wholeness and evil suspended by thin flex over Lincolnshire.
Outside our dirty windows, the State waves huge bags of liquid blood in our faces, spits shit into the eyes of history and claps its oily hands, as Brother Israel flings Old Testament death onto the set of Beirut Vice, dashing fellow Semites into the dark sea of the Eternal. An angry tongue is lashing my back, and my watery brain boils with confusion, fear of shadowy faces on the TV and unconcerted plans to escape all this stench. I want to put a wet tea-towel under the doorjam and stand well back from the sparking, blue touchcurtains. Remember to stay indoors, put your brain into transparent plastic bags, and keep watching Big Brother as it contorts into its thousandth month. In protest, my G: drive, where swill the sweetest sounds ever committed to motherboard, has swathed my music archive in a shiny, white darkness. 'Tis a gaping blackened wound, dripping sociable sounds onto the dusty carpet. Slinky Jones has been enaided to help, but as yet the mysterious thick, prickly hedge remains firm to our touch.
In other news, the Delicate Hammers musical project continues to taint the soil with a forced march to the potato-lands of Lincolnshire tomorrow for IRBSTOCK!, the greatest musical event to nestle in Irby-in-the-Marsh since last August. The gradual ascension of Polytechnic into godhead has taken its toll on Your Sweet Instruments however, as the Lord Ringo will not to available to sign his fingers on the dotted guitar. This will almost certainly lead unto a dozen free-form incorporations of Johnny-Come-Hithers seizing the alacrity of the moment, running their
intentions over clumsily-thumbed Hammer classics. May a thousand carbon Hammers take blossom and fly! Taking all their belongings on with them as handluggage.
In truth, Ringo's incursions into the black heart of the Big Forest are becoming so frequent now that our nascent genius is growing dusty on the shelf. A fifth Hammer is required! The square symmetry for the Four Corners of the Unpocalypse require a fifth point of reference. A swarthy Pentagon of incoherent beauty to drive subtle war against the Devil's own military complex, a mirror burnished with our poisoned hopes and untapped dreams. (What a hefty doormat I weave with these complex fibres!) So anyone with a compass magnetic enough to hit our poles is welcome to hitch their hairy comets to our plummeting stock. Once we hit the airwaves, you know...
Leisure later!
Young Punky Bison Given Keys to Cosmos
10 Awst 2006, 9:25 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Countdown initiated. Man the escape hatches!
Another corona of fruitless words bend into the unknown like a Star Wars prologue. Massing this time on the fringe of the paragraph, a hairy bunch of stormtroopers by the name of Polytechnic. (Yes, them again! But they look superfrigidcool in their Hoth battle gear!)
In addition to buying their crystalline glory in vinyl form, you can also slink over to iTunes and for a measly 79 pence (like 1980s prices!) you can ingest the Pep with digital directivity. Personally, I take Apple as a tiny stain on the broader canvass of other things I'd rather do, but hey! Pep it up your slunkholes til the daylight begs you to stop. Dizzying moments, friends. There are big thumbs gesturing to our prime movers from the wrinkling fortresses of The Big Time, coin rolling from every pore, each fingernail wet with the dying dreams of a hundred thousand glory-hungry thundermonkeys. The Polytechnic in response, the milk of the future running from their pockets and inkwells, climb into the Cymric mountains to coil their songs tightly into recording instruments. Said mountains will quiver with the vacant shakes. An album will shuffle across the ferny floor, the twitching, mewling, shining child of these sessions.
These words don't always clot into the richest cream, kids; but I enjoy it so you don't have to.
Manchester Faces Pep Drought
3 Awst 2006, 22:37 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
We may be the victims of software counterfeiting.
While the Waxcylinder Express pumps our attention ten years into the past, fluffing the decaying priapic edifice of mindless Rock'n'Roll (TM), Polytechnic continue to pass bricks of purest musical beauty and drop them into our drinking water.
Exhibit First: a lovely pair of vinyls known as "Pep". Polytechnic have brought us loaves and fish to feed the thousands waiting in the wings. Our own moody burg is almost sold out of these celestial gifts, but there is still hope in other municipalities across the country. We hope that in gratitude, the nation lofts our brave Multiskilled Individuals onto the plinth in our national hearts, where once Noel Edmonds stood, brandishing Top of the Pops like a drunk traffic warden brandishes his tits. A nice number, something under forty.
To bolster morale, the Polyboys are scuttling around the Kingdom from one tired city to another, beery flowers blossoming in the foot-made hollows, fawns nuzzling their genitals. They are as men o' the woods, robbing the glistening rich to give succour to the needy people.
D-Percussion puts out its planks to them on Saturday, and that should be very glorious. Later in October, they rub riffs with The Young Knives once again.
Last Saturday (there is a blur of sabbaths, whirling around us like a foam of bats) they filled the Islington Mill with their fuzzy pop furnace, opening curtains on new and most luxuriant tunes.
The Nightjars sent more silky super-strings out in the starlight.
Slugs Ate My Parents
straddled the shaky line between bedroom operatic pomp and clumsy, overgrown student naffness. I couldn't tell which side of the line his balls dropped...
The boughs are decked with the blood of fallen angels; let's kick up some dust!
Hammers Press Lonely Thumbs To Holes In Walls of Astral Justice
3 Awst 2006, 00:11 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Meanwhile, Nation Still Shitting Its Sheets In Ten-Year Coma.
Regrets are like butterflies, fair cousins, colourful and fleeting.
We should have reminded you about the gig at the Tiger Lounge this Sunday past, whatever and wherever and whenever you may be, but the wordsmiths had not the oxygen, and their blue lips turned silent. Destiny is a hungry slug, and inexorably nibbles the green shoots of good intention.
Those gaunt figures scattered about the tables in the central Manchester bolt-hole, nestled in the brackish Fifth Quarter, witnessed almost routine quickness of thought and sharpness of intent. First crack, Mr Thomson looped his
innards outwards, more and more furiously until the threadbare sheen at the heart of things dazzled all. In the aftergobble, we sat Sunday-struck in Ed Barton's front room, a Tron-sketched living room of the enfeebled heart, carpeted with tattered untold tales and lit by lamps dimmer than we'd ever known existed. Pulling next upon the emergency cord, Robin Nature-Bold wriggled from one his many writhing shadows, stretching himself out on garden furniture under our friendly gaze. He opened his spidery corners to all-comers, and The Intermittent Gary Nip scaled tiny barricades with Cantonese dexterity, wordfully adding a doubled barrel to the Dizzying '(Ism), a shaky hand discernible under Robin's sleek monastic script. Marginalia for the pressing thousands. Then for the second night in a row The Nightjars hit the world with cunning mallets, driving their juices into the future and fusing it with the past to form glassy scars of Big Now. The moments held us all in their bubbly plenty and stroked our tongues with liquid surprise. Someone get those guys a sandwich. Each.
But there were juicier currents swirling about the middle of the night. Noiselessly in recent days, Your Hammers had sidled up the bill - dislodging Archie Bronsons and sundry other ghostly possibilities - until we trickled earthwards in triumph from their champagne-stained minarets. In lieu of actual rehearsal, we stood together for a few moments toward the back of the room and drank a round of beers, planning to symbiotically string together a coherent necklace of our talents by proximity. A fond hope, fondly considered. A hope that snagged snugly on the coral, but was not holed. A pirate ship of hope, emblazoned with mutual affection and clownish bunting. The hits were navigated skillfully and with no little chatter, but with so few new barks to board, our Tungsten Horde marched towards an ill-defined exit. Beck drove by and aimed a gatling gun, but the window rolled up and the smoky night enfolded his unguessed design. Fingers stopped, strings vibrated into stillness, we packed up - but the ship was gone.
Meanwhile, half-formed shambling cunts scrape tiny flecks of fossilised shit from the titanic ten-year tidemark of Knebworth, the pigeonshit atop the evil, stinking pyramid of the rotten Bank of Oasis. Millions of casually-strewn stooges defined by a second-hand celebration of ambition over scope, of fake money-grubbing cock-stroking hollow non-love, of saying quality and meaning quantity, of Bay City Rollers dressed in Sgt Pepper cast-offs. A thick, fetid, salty, crusted tide of nothing after nothing after nothing. Tracksuit tops squealing with biographical feedback as thousands of donkeys on scooters throw giant donkey-shaped locusts on their shoulders, hoover up the world and shit it out their collapsed and shitty beaks. Their seed has clogged the Heavens, and one day the Hundred Saints of the Final Flame will scorch the Earth clean of their silly memory. Rock'n'roll supernova liberation from what, you scurvy spunkwads?
Coke'n'mirrors, you know. Coke'n'mirrors...
Rain Turned To Pure Golden Love in Lancashire Field
11 Gorffenaf 2006, 22:13 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
May the Hammer of Aslan protect us!
Everywhere you look nowadays, there are Vikings falling from the moody heavens, vomit pouring fr
om their steaming eyes, dark omens dropping from their hairy lips. But they are the also-rans, the cultural byways: only a creamy select band of pagans have the nouse to summon Hammers from their misty mansions and add their blessings to the crazy pile at a Lanky handfastening.
There was a small stage with disco lights. There was fresh, English summer drizzle, and camping sausages, blackening under canvas. There was a bald man with a hammer, and a group of drunk woman baying the name of Lord Ringo, his true secret name that none but those who know it can recall. There was a cachophonous echoey sound system that turned our beautiful homemade noises into a pestilent fury of hornets.
And yet, Delicate Hammers prevailed, we think. Words were exchanged between strangers, words of admiration. Some of the words looked a little like us. Then the workaday time gathered in the distance and the M66 called Cocoen away.
Rice crispies!
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