.jpg)
|
|
|
|
Insidious Junk Box Tired of self-important genetic wrong-turns moidering on about what's rocking their Carricot this week/month/lunch-hour? Well, here's some selections eating into our ears right now.* Beck - Guero (Interscope) * Self-depreciation: she come easy; humility takes a little more work. |
Haps with the Chaps
On a russet evening such as this, one's mind turns to MP3s. With blood pumping from our punctured knees the Hammers crawl out from underneath the latest agri-urban mashclash and deposit a new version of Rubber Neck girls on the
MP3 page.
If you value your soul, you know what to do - pray to Jesus. But if you are curious about these Rubber Neck Girls, then click over immediately.
Remember - sometime life is more than just a three minute conversation.
Archaeologists don't know. In the future they'll count the rings in the brickwork and conclude that some massive electro-volcano must have torn through the crust of the Earth in glorious song. They'll be three-fifths right.
Group Hug alumni
Thought Universe and Tommy Walker III (of
Human Shield) will be running around on scaffolding made from plastic straws constructing a neo-Gothic town hall of electroacoustics and technosound. With real Mayors and councillors and everything. A bit like the dozers on Fraggle Rock. (Were they called dozers?)
A bank of scientific instruments suggest this will happen at
Monatronic on Thursday, May 26th at
Tmesis/Audio. And we all trust banks, right?
It will be beautiful. Ancient civilisations reached for the dream of everlasting life to ensure they could be there, but failed. You owe it to them to attend. And it's free for all.
Manchorlton was shaken to its very ceiling as the shining mahogany treehouse where eagle-taloned krautpunk griffins The Conversation tear the pink, glistening fresh from the bones of their enemies bore witness to a front room mash-up of quantum proportions.
Do you remember Stars on the Water? Well, now they are
The Night Jars, a band that People Around the Know are already calling "a family of night-flying aerial insectivores". As they played, the wallpaper was quickly coated with an ectoplasmic ooze of accord and no-one had a bad breath to slip about them. Do you remember the Night Jars? Holes in the sky, my friends; holes in the sky.
Fuck all that, what of the others? Well, the Hammers nextly tripped up the carpet and vomited up something resembling their greatest hits. We played all the right notes, just not necessarily the left ones that gave them balance. Drum noises fell onto the floor and rolled around like crazed beetles, words roamed our minds inappropriately and fell out by accident, rhythm became a rubber band with which to taunt the Universe. Our shirts burned, our eyes slipped, our hearts made gravy while the night shone. Then as soon as we realised what was happening, we stopped.
Tearing up the stair carpet in a whirlwind of destiny, scattering lumberjacks in their bloody slipstream, roared Milk Thief, another lurker in the Barlow Moor realm of dusk. At least twelve Christs were there, painting and decorating, and they wiped their clammy brows with their rollers and downed their meths in tribute. They knew the twitching jolly dance of the Rhodes when they heard it.
Then The Conversation began and a pure, bright light filled the room. The dozen Emmanuels evaporated in discrete respect, leaving a grey flash outline on the ceiling. The assembled lengthened into wolves and crowed at the crescent moon, whiskey biting out the insides of their veins. There was pain, but it was beautiful. All went thick with night.
A nearby English teacher remarked - "Tightly-Squeezed. Giggly. Family-Oriented. I'd happily let my children attend."
Dark doppelgangers are abroad in the wiry wetlands of Warrington. The teeth of these evil twins chatter like fierce pandas, as they chafe along the margins. Dark looming figures caress musty cricket bats. Another Conversation walks the earth of East Lancs and they are hot for misrule. But Chorlton's brightest are on the side of the angels and these angels have dirty tactical weapons.
Also in the locker is a forthcoming appearance in Rant magazine. Wait till the undermotivated kids read about the 'Sation: they'll be spelling out their names in spent matchsticks in High Streets up and down the dilapidated Britain we call Home. The kids will chew out their own knuckles to fashion whistles to call the birds from the trees to spread the word of The One True Conversation, one holy, catholic and apostolic krautpunk expedition.
But but ... your trusty Hammers also peek into print in the neartimesoon. The luscious mag project,
Papercut has wandered into the Manchorlton Badlands to speak gentle with the Hammers. Soon our mingled words will smear themselves across another issue. They had nice hair. We remember the hair.
Well, it's over for another year. ATP has left our lives, leaving behind some sticky memories and a warm/cold halo around our hearts. However the Hammers have not rested, but rather taken up a twin attack on the grey days in the middle.
While Goat and Lamb lay down on the sandy soil in East Sussex, Lord Sutchbury and The Conversation chewed up yet more floorboards at the Tiger Lounge and Club NME at the Bierkeller. Any passing star/travellers would have ripped the iPods from out their navels and turned their bizarrely shaped aural organs to the source of such sweet noise. Thousands probably did.
They have also scattered their fingerprints into the galaxy that is the superinfohighweb
here. May contain traces of MP3.
Gaz, Suzanne, Steve - the Source of All Wisdom - and the Gnomic Jerseyites all squatted, boozed and observed great music taking place. George was there and her presence celebrated all Saturday with red crosses, fireworks and tinpot symphonies. Coc Oen & Loopol hit Friday with pistons blazing, White Russian in the left and beer/whiskey in the right, and yet there were no hangovers. Camber's magic sands do not permit hangovers. And the music? Oh, such music to make your brain erupt into blooming plumes of ash metallic joy.
Afrirampo were the brightest balloon on Friday night, narrowly eclipsing the rusted rock machine that was
Blues Explosion and the glittering fuckfest that was the live
Peaches experience. The Ramp girls squealed, screamed, chanted and battered their instruments: at one point, playing the guitar with drumsticks in a twisted Osaka sculpture of themselves. Their downright sexiness could not be dislodged from my underevolved brainstem by any amount of dance and booze. They can still be heard on Rob da Bank's site for the next few days
here.
On to Saturday and the cloudy gods crowded around the sky for a look at what all the fuss was about. With the sunshine's retreat, so the curtains and doors slid shut and the usual indie reticence descended on our neighbours, so we hit the beach with the Swamp with shit spilling out both sides of our mouths.
Twas the Fresh Prince of Nova Scotia who ruled Saturday with a warped rod of bohemian bronze. So what if Tom Waits demands hen's teeth on his riders, go see the handsome
Buck kick the shit out of the ghosts and spectres in the meantime. Other notables were
Autolux, LA showbiz Golems who had some nice tunes almost despite their cool selves; PJ Harvey played her first solo set in something like a dozen years and was charming as hell;
Olivia Tremor Control packed the stage with
The Sabbath brought yet more fizzy paste and tequila & coke (Coc Oen's sip of choice) and rain the size of planets. It got slow and pretty in equal measure.
The Tints were minty fresh and surprisingly poshly-tongued, carving out some delicate, thrashy, wonky pop; Big Ted Curson tickled away the cobwebs with some softly pulsing jazz noises; Gang Gang Dance wrestled with some wires and bounced with pleasure;
Magik Markers scrawled illegible boasts across the Lion King mural and mumbled about sucking their ding dongs.
Prefuse 73 raised himself above the rest however with a steel-wristed display of live breaks and musty sounds. Tumbling towards a conclusion, The Zombies burned bright and incongruous, reminding us who had intended rock and roll for us, before the thick celebrity skaggy darkness of Yoko Ono left all littering the thirsty carpet. Evil in a false raincoat of light. So long, Vincent, and thanks for all the shit.
Vincent Gallo himself may spawn and shit where he drinks, spongey slit running from every puckered, dehydrated orifice, but even he can wear the choirboy white of a collector of finest butterflies.
While my bone-melting rage will like as not lay waste to buffaloes and brown bunnies, scooping their awful yellow ash into second-hand teabags and flushing them into the Channel, the marshmallow within eventually will out and the love tumble after. Buck 65! The Zombies! Prefuse 73! Peaches! John Foxxx! Afrirampo! I could not go on...
Loopol the Ever-Living Goatboy will descend on the quiet fens and downs of England once more with dark Welsh cohort MC Coc Oen in tandem. A whole sketchpad of welcome angelic stuntmen fill the chattering chalets - the Swamp, Slinky Jones, Filthy Pedro, the Source of All Wisdom himself and yet more. We hope to baby elephants you're there too.
In a matter of hours, the bottomless carpet upstairs at Pontins, Camber Sands will drink deep or our spilt drinks and the beach will be scorned for yet another round of warm alcohol. Mushrooms cannot grow quickly enough in even the darkest of brownhouses.
See
here!
All Tommorrow, Probably.
While fingers hit keyboard over at Hammer Towers in Manchorlton Hardly, its sullen sister Manchorlton Medlock hosts the Conversation in full noise.
The Font Bar, nurturing seedbed of the phenomenon that is Group Hug, plays happy bosom once more as
Papercut magazine launches Issue 5 with help of the Barlow Moor behemoths.
The Conversation are indeed busy boys once more with a hectic schedule pulling on their souls in the next week.
Sunday sees the rock centaurs make hoof noises where Delicate Hammers may have tread if not for the lure of Camber. Robin Nature-Bold of Band(ism) warped renoun assembles the creamy crop each month at Tiger Lounge. His Auto Test Pilot night attracts arty magpies with glittery sweetwrappers. Their beaks pick at the flesh to make space for jewels. By way of dialogue, The Conversation peel back their hats and challenge the feathered to sharpen their insights.
Then stepping on the next stone as though directed by unheard clocks once Monday grinds around the shining lads clamber on stage at the Bierkeller's shaky
Club NME night. They proffer support to Battle, alleged post-punk scamps and Gliss, who look like
this. Their generosity in helping raise money for an ailing indie Smash Hits that smells like wax crayons can only be applauded.
Will this launch their loins on a stratospheric ascension to cartoon godhead?
Elsewhere Peaches Geldof launches a TV career. What new Pope can prevent such abhominations?
The first few flakes of sunshine may have seemed like some shimmering mirage but the summer has truly broken out from our hearts.
Group Hug has taken on a temporary mutated charitable form - HUG AID! - and will solidify on the material plane at Tmesis on Lloyd Street from
7.30 on Friday, 15th April. Phil Collins will be coming in by helicopter and we've got some surface-to-air missiles to throw to the skies in celebration.
In the red basket with crimped bootlace trim,
The Remote Control are primed and ready to tear us a new brainhole with fruity solid rock. Crawling from the neck of a broken bottle of salty innuendo, the Prints of Whales warm up for their Rain or Shine appearance by melting our angry fists into hands. And the tuxedo enigmatron that is Band(ism) pour noise paint down the walls of our mind in preparation.
In exchange we ask for five of your sweat-soaked clams.
Your fiver will go to
Hands Around the World, who help communities in Africa to build their own hospitals and
civic centres. Loopol and the Lord Sutchbury themselves will be heading to Zambia in the Summer and need to raise cash to help send the next wave in 2006.
And we give you Delicate Hammers. Whaddelse you want, you creeps?
With a salty stab of his hungry oceanic fork, Poseidon struck up the 12 dolphin salute as the history of lo-fi, thrusting unpop washed up on the pebbly shore. Eagles ate chips from the outstretched hoofs of tigerprint unicorns. A dreamlike and magical scene.
Suddenly, the carpet was brown and sticky as the feedback lassoed our dreams and spun them around our heads. The finest Motown never written was leaping from our mouths and hands a New playmates sprang from the floorboards with smiles on their clothes and smacked their hands together. Two clear eyed souls even threw a spindly spider's web bridge up the M6 and into the future
to see if we'd climb along back in the Summertime. One called himself partly Betika and they live
here.
Then True Swamp Neglect hovered onto the stage. Blood propelled by nitrous rockets, fingers licking the forest's edge, their music was carried round the room on bee-dran chariots.
Regal rockrock with radiowaves for thoughts, it burned our bonnets. The cracks of flesh in my hand were telling me to write their name in my own entrails all over the beach for seagulls to nourish themselves upon.
Cars would've crashed into roadside cafes, causing over £24 worth of damage,
just to play along with their whistling airbags. If you ever, ever have the
opportunity to see and hear these lizards leap, do not slip the step.
Your memory gland will thank you for ever. Beef & Liberty!
As promised one faint month or so ago,
Filthy Pedro has made his way onto the national broadcast system of BBC Radio One. The time for pause button bothering is over, but you can still hear the fruits of his brain
here. A more eloquent case for anti-folk you will not hear outside of his flat.
You also hear from celestial beings such as Devendra Banhart, Gruff Rhys and James Yorkston. But you must move quickly as come April 4th the internet archive faeries will spirit his voice and those of his like-minded sect away into the ether, never to be heard again.
If by some cruel twist of fate, you read this after the fateful date has passed, then I grieve your loss.
But there is an MP3 available of his live performance at the Sidewalk Cafe in
NYC
here. The Filth Abides.
Our synapses are calloused from frenetic rehearsals, but bwoy, we ready!
The minidisk is primed, the kazoo oiled, the bass pedal freshly fuzzed and the Eggvan ready to rip tiny bits of tarmac into the air.
We head south at 12:45am precisely in order to arrive at the Central in
Parkstone for April Fool's Night. The M6 Toll Road has been scattered with pine-scented envelopes in preparation. There's talk of some kind of celebratory arch being erected in Portland marble, but we don't want to make a fuss. We're simple folk.
Rumours whispered by message board turkeys of absent PAs will not dislodge us
from our destined path. Our friends
True Swamp Neglect have poured petrol onto
our smouldering legend and flames have leapt. They said: "They play
pop music in an unpopular way and will turn your mind into tripe and onions."
A church of interested types are swarming like African bees around the
Central, thermos flasks of belief tucked into their sleeping bags.
They feel the Heat approach.
POST SCRIPTUM: Never tiring to burn oxygen in the cause of creating great vibrations, the Lord Sutchbury will also be smacking skins tonight (31st of March) at the Dry Bar with The Conversation. One day they will ignite whole housing estates with their thunderous strides, but you can still catch them before they crush your ribs. Run to the hedges!
For one glorious weekend, hormone-addled sides of pork become tiny scarlet-jerseyed giants and the oldest language* in Europe is thrown noisily to the heavens in praise and
exultant relief.
Once again Y Cymrogi have a placemat and full set of knives and forks and their name engraved somewhere silver and shiny.
What better time to tug forelocks and drink beer at the shoulders of London-based, bluegrass-smoking, banjo-shuffling, Pink Moon-harvesting gauchos, Prints of Whales?
What about the 16th April at
Rain or Shine in Salford's rotund Kings Arms? Dusty young men melting hearts in the dirty aul' town itself.
If that weren't enough to sway your calloused ears in their direction, how about the fact they will be supporting delicious electronickal moodsters
Tunng? The sound of this summery Spring
condensed into waxen balls, slowly burning in your ears. All together
now..."Rebellious Sais to Crush..."
Pardon us for shouting, dear Reader, but the sweat still drips from our collective armpit and our ears buzz so hard that the cuticles are shaken from our fingers.
That which was Audition has climbed down from the clouded mountain in a familiar yet engorged form. The Phoenix and Chimera have butted heads and from their broken noses have poured and mingled The Conversation.
First spotted at Sexy Rest night, a seductive rockpool of Sunday reflection at Withington warmspot
Fuel, The Conversation sported a newcoming set of fingers on guitar. Fingers that have walked all but 34% of the pavements between Wilbraham Road and the Potsdamer Platz in search of the vibrating truth. The identity beind these digits is as misty and densely magnetic as a wandering nebula, but his shadow is sure and his stance insouciant. The tomato had been sliced and the BLT cling-filmed.
The next Thursday neglected rivers turned industrial green with envy and the night sky a swirling grainy chocolate black, as another stage was colonised by this heavy-footed krautstuff hybrid.
To a packed house at Academy 3, these sleek new gods opened their musical veins to the hungry crowd below and smeared the cold, dark sound of punky complexity across their gaping lips.
Fiery drunken enthusiasm rippled across the assembled types, translucent jellyfish in the salty ocean. Small shards of that night embedded themselves in grey matter all over the room.
And then to last night's
Blow Out and the Bierkeller for a damp-brick putsch, rising up against the lumpen amps and stonewashed mongstares of our half-ghetto adversaries. Constructing a near infinite noise-loop holding pattern over the Scally flightpath that is Piccadilly, our Manchorlton men of honour spelt out their message in illegible symbols across the inky expanse above, partly obscured by the broody buildings scrumming over our heads.
We walked up from the velvet underworld out into the sorry city with steel hoops round our hearts.
The Conversation will return in Revenge of the Conversation.
Not only is this suave aristo-cad a moustachioed Hammer of the first water and a Group Hug founder member, but he also slaps hard on the skins for local krautpunk Titans,
Audition with alarming regularity. As indeed a drummer should.
The beautiful blue Bedford van Lord Ringo had planned to drive up and down Barlow Moor Road, exchanging shiny lollipops with fruity young ladies for base animal contact, has recently been declared close to death. So this is an urgent appeal to any listless honeys out there in the Manctropolitan area to huddle down to the Academy and do their best to cheer up Manchorlton's most dashing blade.
And Audition themselves? They sound like only a three-headed machine of dark musical impulse would after being locked in a dank attic for nigh on forty days and nights.
Tight, my friends. Tight and monstrous.
Arrive mob-handed and promptly to avoid dismemberment.
In scenes reminding all present of a strange amalgam of two of Mathew Broderick's finest hours, the AF/UK Godzilla that is Filthy Pedro paraded down Big Apple sidewalks singing "Danke Schön" and dodging murderous Polish sailors.
No less an august establishment than BBC Radio One decided that the event should be recorded for history and future broadcast. Filth's Druidic tones will soon vibrate across the ocean, educating many in the ways of Thrice Great Hermes.
Keep 'em peeled, bloody and raw.
As the Hammers settled down to Takeshi's Castle for another eye-blistering
evening's undertainment, squadrons of zombie carrier pigeons pelted the
ManCamelot HQ with urgent messages from the Hanging Winter Gardens of
Bournemouth. A joint gig/off with our musical fellownauts,
True Swamp Neglect, was proposed: a ravioli
western stuffed with rumbling ricotta and spinach leaf shonk. It was
greedily devoured. Witnesses to Group Hug last
May will attest TSN are a truly spirited people with lava in
their crotches and a towering library of charms. They make music to coax
the dolphins from Poole Harbour and get them hooked on cheap cigs and Canadian
whiskey. They will host a night of indie magic at the Central in
Parkstone, Dorset on the 1st of April 2005. To restore the cosmic balance
with some dark uncertainty, Delicate Hammers v 2.0 will be christened with
light applause, whoops and discerning confusion that very same night .
Pure white gowns will be optional. Records may be spun at both 33 and 45
rpm. It's Bear v Shark, people! After almost a year of lying slumped
underneath the sofa of our own indifference, the Delicate Hammers have
polished off the last few jars of locusts and honey and arisen from their torpor
with hope for the future in tiny buckets of news.
A weekend of rigorous training in the idyllic snows of Camber Sands took a
grubby protractor to our brain angles and water soluble Lakeland colouring
pencils shaded in the gaps in our hearts with a secret light. Sutchbury
sucked hard on the teat of Mother Heaviosity for inspiration:
Pearls & Brass and
Bad Wizard especially lighting up a whole flotilla of thoughtboats. Coc
Oen & Loopol, the Dark Welsh half-hop shepherds, poured from the hillside and
feasted thirstily on slabs of musical beef. Slint slunted. Mogwai
melded. A curious timebag phenomenon meant the same records were played
night after night in the pub. The heavy paving slabs were ripped from off
our hearts. We returned from
our beautiful disport and looked at the crumbling brickwork of the city from atop our oaken towers. Warm tears of love for the flinty souls beneath crept down our mute faces.
Hoary hands sped to moss-worn instruments. Vocal nodes softened and uncoiled their angry grip from round our throats. Rheumy bones walked around the room and made a few cups of tea. Two further shadowy Hammers emerged from behind trembling skyscrapers to lend
their hands to our work.
Soon we will stand ready to spread our dandelion seed into the urban thermal
swirl. We are the Arthurian sub-elite; the Manchorlton Candidates with thorny
threads of bramble running through our golden arms; the Sylvan Sinatras; the
Nathanbarleyccorns of bucolic breaks, eating limited edition sandwiches where
the streets meet the stream. Under the pavement, a beech tree! |
While Ringo kept the home torch burning, the Dark Welsh contingent spliced noxious fibres into their genes with the beauty/fool people at ATP. Vincent's disciples were thick in number but many of them were exceeding pleasant to look at. We built our own nest high in the branches and the flock of our friends was most numerous - Filthy Pedro chewed hard on the rubbery teat of King Mushroom, Slinky Jones the Associate went Lemmy and saw his chin for the first time in three years, the Swamp dragged neophyte Randall along and taught him basic chalet survival tips such as drinking from puddles, peddling wet paint to strangers and dancing like a dying horse.
flugelhorns and the like; and
This disturbance in the urban force has buckled pavements, caused buses to
convert into cowsheds and drawn some mighty moths to dance with our flickering
flame. In addition to the cantering stallions that have already left their
hoof-marks on our stable doors, we pull back the curtains on new delights.
In honour of St Patrick, Audition will be taking the stage at Manchester Academy 3 (so named they good it thrice) on Thursday, 17th March for a mere pittance as part of the
