|
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.*
Roots Manuva - Slime &
Reason (Big Dada)
Japancakes - Loveless (Darla)
Wetdog
- Send A Delegate (iTunes)
Beck - Odelay! (Deluxe
Edition) (Geffen)
The Nightjars - Towards Light
(Reveal)
Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft
(Sony)
Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head
(Warner)
Johnny Cash - American Recordings IV: The Man
Comes Around (Lost Highway)
Flying White Dots - Staring
At The Sky (download)
Orbital - The Middle of Nowhere
(FFRR)
Jim Noir - Jim Noir (My Dad)
Lethal Bizzle
- Back To Bizznizz (V2)
Polvo - Exploded Drawing (Drag
City)
Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation of Millions To
Hold Us Back (Columbia)
Times New Viking - Present The
Paisley Reich (Siltbreeze)
True Swamp Neglect - Cloud
Cloud Cloud (iTunes/Reckno)
Venetian Snares - Rossz
Csillag Allat Szuletett (Planet Mu)
Fuck Buttons -
Street Horrrsing (ATP Recordings)
Animal Collective -
Water Curses (Domino single)
Boards of Canada - Music
Has The Right To Children (Warp/Skam)
Future of the Left
- Curses (Too Pure)
Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends
(Wichita)Foals - Antidotes (Transgressive)
Breeders
- Mountain Battles (4AD)
Holy Fuck - LP (Young
Turks)
Soulwax - Most of the Remixes... (EMI)
Hot
Chip - Made In The Dark (EMI)
Blur - Modern Life Is
Rubbish (EMI/Food)
Various Artists - Morvern Callar OST
(Warp)
Buck 65 - Situation (Warners)
Burial -
Untrue (Hyperdub)
Various Artists - Tropicalia:
Revolution in Brazil (Soul Jazz)
The Chap - The Horse
(Lo)
Radiohead - In Rainbows (XL Recordings)
Neon
Neon - Stainless Style (Lex)
*
Self-depreciation: she come easy; humility takes a little more
work.
|
Haps
with the Chaps
Dog
Sees Face of Chris Tarrant In Onion Bagel
28 Awst
2008, 20:16 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Frequent
as the bicycles in heaven are the ways we Hammers stalk the
infinite.
As mentioned in other dispatches, the Insidious Junkbox visible
screen left has made itself into a podcast form only this last
week, and is now available to download here.
Why not give it a listen and let MC
CocOen exactly where he is flaunting the laws of good and
useful taste?
More Lemons Swing
Heavy From The Autumnal Bough
28 Awst
2008, 14:38 2008 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Legion are the jedi in the
church of Hammer, and sweaty their boxers.
Summer is slowly beginning to
weaken in its arm-wrestle with the burgeoning Autumn, but there
are opportunities for the cracks in the pavement to shit pure
sunshine.
That's
right, the Hammers return. And this time we are clambering along
with bigger boys, Blowout
have
kindly invites us to make with the gubbins once again and turn the
ceiling to a mushy paste of audience appreciation. Slug-like
trails on bucket seats, you know the drills. CocOen's throat is
being filled in with wooden struts, a tiny Charles Bronson making
his way down on a little cart with soil pouring out of his shorts.
Loopol is surveying his unmarried manhood once more before he is
claimed by his local blacksmith in Salford. Master Egg is
teetering on the edge of pharmaceutical chaos as always. Lord
Stuchbury still bears the aches and pains of his tumbling at the
wonky Olympics.
Other bands tomorrow night
include dirty indie rocker ambitioners, The Paris Riots; soft
focus folky strummers, Meadow; and beatbox/acoustic
cross-fertilisers, Shoshin. All clocks indicate that we may well
be on first, but then that gives us all the rest of the evening to
scorn and drink and fraternise with members of our various enemy
sexes. We are sexually complicated types, you see?
In
further Hammeraktion news, we have more marks on our leathery
belts for notches to be scored upon. Firstly, we will set foot
once again into the trend-splattered Northern Quarter to take part
in electroconical night Triptonic
at Bar Centro on Tib Street round about the time that the
calendars say 2nd October. We will stand shoulder to boulder with
Beats for
Beginners, and we're pretty sure that they've made records
come out and everything! Maybe by then we might have managed the
same. (Pardon us, while we wipe the pussy tears from our broken,
giggling sphinctres.)
Then,
our eyebrows flatten out with excitement even more heavily as we
return to the vegetarian crow's house that is Fuel in Withington
to pump out more of them there Cloud
Sounds for the uneasily squirming populace there assembled.
Rumour whispers that we are playing with newly-revived scouse
phlegmatics, Tramp Attack!; and Welsh coast machiavellis, Gintis.
Ted of said CS is said to be excited about the line-up, and come
1st November, you too can share in the puddles of bliss staining
the wallpaper.
So plenty to keep you getting
out of bed in the morning then, eh?
We're forever blowing Hammers!
Glass Ceiling Found To Contain Traces of
Mistake
31
Gorffenaf 2008, 16:13 – Gorsaf Stockport, Swydd Caer
Tiger Lounge Carpet Opens Up To
Reveal Smoky, Swirling Void We'd Suspected All Along!
Something of a challenging week
in the musty annals of Coc-lore this week, but one worth reporting
nonetheless. Somewhere on this dessicated plane of happiness there
are small insects that feed on this virtually-sustenant news like
an ambrous sap, only to be unwittingly preserved in their Jurassic
alienation until Mother Science comes and cracks them open. As
soon as they spill out these tales of Hammers Yore, those
assembled block their ne'er-hear-well ears and throw bottles of
piss at the weak and disoriented microbeasts. I have seen this
happen, traced on the pavements of Deansgate Locks, sketched in
the stinging-kidney'd piss of the thoughtless and stripey-shirted.
OK, there was the job interview,
where Coc felt as though roughly half of the intestines that had
been boiling and writhing so insuccintly the previous week were
cracked open to the skies and scrutiny of the lard-chinned gods.
The augurs were not well. There would be no hobbing of nobs with
champagne-fluted party-clones with bulging expense accounts. A
fiery fever swept the lobes and spat the future out of my hands
and into the toilet.
Elsewhen, the Hammers had
returned to the frey and ground their gums against the splintering
floor of the Tiger Lounge once more. Another Fiction Non Fiction
bleeding noisily into the good Tuesday night, another
non-soundcheck. While we were musically pretty tight that night,
Coc's vocal erupted almost the instant we started, thick coils of
hoarse wrapped about his throat, great thorny hedgerows of unsound
scratching the air around the Hammers. Some had not seen us
before, and while they enjoyed what there was, there was not
enough.
Gloomy was the solitary pint
that followed.
Facial Hair Linked
to Seagull Obesity
8
Gorffenaf 2008, 16:45 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Hoist the pinatas and let's fuck
some historical shit!
So Friday eventually petered out
into some desperate early morning acoustic jams up at the Stone
Circle, and after a few hours sleep, Saturday presented itself,
smug in the knowledge that it had Jay-Z at its pyramidal apex. In
fact, the various headline sets on Saturday were tightly logjammed
in the future, with only tiny chinks of possibility between them,
winking in and out of existence. But CocOen had a plan. He would
not be denied.
Chief
#1 of the delights was the dry, firm soil beneath our feet.
Otherwise, Saturday was a peculiar journey into Glastos past with
repeat feeds at the Cassetteboy trough in the Glade,
Squarepusher's brainbag of cacophonous treats and Holy Fuck
kicking out more of their pummelling wire-rock. However, it was
The Park that grabbed the notepad in my head and wrote in large
letters "THESE ARE SWEET TIMES INDEED". Polish Dan and
myself had aimed to measure Swedish fairy-chaser Lykke
Li against
her album "Youth Movies", which we had both admired.
There was a band with her, and they were all dressed in white.
Huge guitar sounds bounced off and ricocheted around our heads as
though we were sitting on a pleasant lawn at the centre of some
languid warzone. Surely there were some electronic dulcimers or
butterfly wings in there somewhere? But we loved it. Eventually a
dull ache crossed our minds and we realised it was St
Vincent,
another solo songslinger with some hired thumbs rolling out their
sound. This was around the time that she said they were called St
Vincent. However, Lykke Li also brought the sweet pain to bear on
our happy saplings that afternoon. So all that was good. Swedes
and Canadians linking daisies into nooses for our heads to slip
into and forget the world.
**The rest of this report was
seized by the custom authorities in Belize where CocOen and his
Lady Lou had recently been off trying to capture bees to
re-introduce into our dark and tremelous city. Once the relevant
papers have been recovered, then this gig shall be laid to rest.
You can count on that, friends.**
Separate Time Zone Suggested For Idiots By
Idiots
3
Gorffenaf 2008, 22:46 - Taurus Heights, West Deadsbury
Glastonbury. Even the word
evokes a small town in Somerset.
The Hammers are back like
cock-eyed fruitflies, multiple legs quivering and buckled after a
whirlwind week of sun, dried mud, metal tent pegs and late night
lizardry. The skies were on our side, friends, and the curtains
closed around our unhappy thoughts. There were slackers and
cloudwatchers that hung about the urban margins, giggling under
their thumbs. I felt the fear myself, though I could not place
anywhere precisely about my person. We hadn't even looked at the
cultural significances that had been spelt out before us, both
musical and mineral. Our eyes were locked instead on the five day
forecast, on the camping itineraries, on our pharmaceutical
shopping lists, on the entrails of passing rodents we had strewn
under the unwavering eyes of our gods in attempt to augur our
immediate futures.
Yeah, mud.
Yeah, wellies. Yeah, Jay-Z and the potential death of all that's
Glastonbury in the world. Yeah, lazy newspaper/NME flarn about
filth. Yeah, stone circle drug drones moidering long into the
night. Yeah, yeah and yeah. But is that what it was all about? Our
newscub reporters were there and about, tearing up little pieces
of paper and scribbling on them, chewing up leaves and twigs to
mush into a delicious sticky paste, sculpting opinion in their
tiny claws. And their hand-stitched reports were so luminous to
behold, that the surrounding hedgerows caught alight and voles
were cooked ironically by the hundredful. The jist jizzed justly.
 Our
Group Hug stagelet was something of a success, nested as it was at
the side of the Stone Circle Highway. We honeyed in a few juicy
locusts: Manc kids in animal helmets, lush-voiced youngsters in
pink wellies, fiddle-playing acrobats,
south
London banjo troubadours,
half-brained,
cider-burnt, self-shouting hedgerow poetasters. We even somehow
garnered the attentions of one-time Hammer-caster, Rob da Bank -
see here
for
the beautiful glimpse behind the fiddler's head. We didn't even
know he'd been there. But perhaps the bestest and most
glory-soaked of all was the Boy Kane, the Diddy Russian Mafiosa -
half-Thugg, half-Politburo, the OKGB. Once his dark, chubby
mutterings eked across the gloam, the Green Hug space was never
quite the same again. We paid tribute with plastic dollar. We were
humble thanes to his bretwalda.
Soup also
warped out of the Mancunian past, featuring His Lordship Ringo,
Tiny Tom, Robin Big Potatoes and Rachel That Sings - the
loose-limbed Prometheans. Hammers too shook the ir
fingers in the general direction of the shimmer with a couple of
punchy sets, intended to draw talent to the stage by opening our
skill vacuum. When we bumped knuckles with the envelope, the
results were pleasing. Moon In Aries saw another outing, ending in
wine-cup-toppling guitar fury. There was an artful synthesis of
the tiny chain of live jazz brain neural plosions and some
spoken-word Cockery. A regular Tom Waits Scott Heron and The
Blockheads we were, but with twigs for hands. The applause was
audible.
So
who else had started our engines over the weekend? Quite a
question. By the time the bands start polishing their stances on
the myriad of performing surfaces, we Hammers and our cohorts had
been there the past part of a week, trying to work out which way
the ground rose, congealing the good times for later use in our
yurts and camper vans. Thursday night saw rains aplenty and fear
tore into our intestines like hungry foxes. I sat scowling in the
corner of a round smoky Mongolian space as good vibes dissolved
unbroadcast about me. But not long after midnight the clouds
ceased their malevolent machinations and my balls swelled with
mischief. Explorations were in order. The Queens Head pulsed with
live music, the mud puddled and splashed with little pleasing
tinkles against my confident boots. My plastic dollar persuaded
one friendly soul that I was Hova's cousin, and that she would be
blessed with a royal outshout from his Holiness come Saturday at
the Pyramid stage. Weed was smoked on it. We were all party to the
numinous jape. Eventually the night ended with a wine-drizzled
crawl back to tents. The last still-dark bedtime of the week.
Friday,
the day set aside for Venus to wash her hair in readiness for a
weekend of slender-boobed frolick, blowdrying it on the ardent
sighs of her broken associates. Jimmy Cliff ruled the evening from
his World Jazz  Emporium,
drooling streams of gospel into our hearts, skanking like a
pensionable crane; but underneath this beautiful capstone, the day
had swelled admirably in our collective breast. This was the year
when the idyllic potential of the Park stage blossomed into steady
reality, fanned by zephyrous sunshine and nourished by extra
stages. Santogold
planted
her Brooklyn daisies first, and maybe set the mood. There was
still the cottonwool threat of
never-being-able-to-sit-down-outside-again hanging low in the sky
at this point, but her self-congratulatory solar energy held off
the impossible. So popular she was that the auditory hill was
covered right to the crest with eager donors. We had to strain our
organs for glimpses of her big shades magic, but it nuggeted out
all the same, and the festive contract was stamped. The pensive
puppetmaster Magic
Arm,
another
thirsty Mancunian indrift, gradually ballooned out from his usual
monocranial pedal-pushing genius into a full band before the
baleful gaze of a BBC audience. This had the unexpected delight of
Yours T. Ruly finding his face on the bottom corner of the screen
after one of his appearances on the BBC
Glastonbury iPlayer.
However, I preferred it when he pluckily turned his lone trucker
cap against a glowering world and did without the dirty M-word
that is Musicianism.
Greater
and more fiery still perhaps was the highlight that was Hip Hop
Karaoke. This took place in a steamy wee tent opposite the Park
stage, and your humble correspondent, the CocNoc, was first to
burnish the stage with his Cymric interpretation of Rebel Without
A Pause, an interpretation which was one pause short and became a
little unstuck as a result, but will shit memories for decades to
come. Somewhat onanastically, my greatest experience of the
weekend, although precious few of the Group Hug collective were
there to witness it, and I fear Dutch Lee holds the key to further
informative seedcast. Petition him hard as concrete.
More news
to dribble along like the poison on a ninja's string about those
Days That Begin With S.
It's that
third Frankenstein that I believe in.
Culture Exits
Indicated On Your Left, Please
11 Mehefin
2008, 19:37 - Taurus Heights, West Deadsbury
All the
blue that's fit to shit.
Things
have been quiet amongst the twinkly hedges where them those
Hammers wander about plucking at fruit in the shape of forties
moviestars and spreading tiny piles of dead wasps into miniature
rugs. This is all due to a massive wound.
 While
the Venerable Goatboy of Loopol was taking small bits of wood off
other larger pieces of wood, the trusty metal friend with the
sharp, speedy teeth leapt up into the frame and bit into his
singing finger, tendon chewed up and knuckle rendered unbendable.
This was while Coc was sunning his nuts on the costa Minehead, you
see? So his alibi is close to being intact.
Requests
for us to bring our tiny orchestra of half-trained rodents to
perform at children's birthday parties and twisted black orgies
have been trickling in steadily, and we have had to turn them all
down while the stitches in his hand dissolve. Which means that in
order to take part in the exciting
Open
Heart Century,
co-birthed by Hug Committee Life Member, Handsome
Nick,
the Hammers must compact like corned beef into the singular. For
the first time since records began spinning themselves, CocOen the
Neverliving will plant solo feet upon the wallowing stage and spit
his ornate wordy madrigals into the honeyed ears of those about.
Tiny are
the pins that hold back the chaos. The words might just tumble in
the manner of biscuits. Maybe some art might get vomited into
ten-inch action.
Yeah, I
know, I must have changed at Kings Cross.
Seagull Vomits Thor
in Bizarre Origins Storyline
25 Mai
2008, 04:25 - Taurus Heights, West Deadsbury
Peas and
Fucking, yeah?
Picture a
town, its mossy seaside lumps shrouded in Somerset mists, its
feathers ruffled by a descending parliament of rock owls - a town
where golliwogs are on sale alongside where copies of The Guardian
should be. Blue blood congealing around their liver-spotted Tory
arteries, the scum. An ideal setting for lung-bending indie rock.
 Under
the eye of the gulls we waited, amidst the confused feetpaths of
the wandering dinosaurs, and plotted our routes through the
beanfields of musical genius. This time I rolled with a full
society, the People of the Swamp, the Natural Gas Kru. It was all
tubes of Pringles, Smiley Culture MP3s and cachophony. And more
Indiana Jones. Drink was also back on the menu, delicious drink,
drink enough to steam a man's brainballs long into the morning.
Howeverly, the fact that there was a Mexican spaghetti chapel
standing watch over our proceedings failed to alter the
inutterably unjazz layout of the camp. Carve these words into your
thoughtbulbs, my acolytes: Imitation villas doth not a party make.
 But
we had the soundtrack, friends, spooling out all over. Tiny
Japanese noise importers
Mono
spat
fire all the opening credits in classy quiet/loud style. A tiny
circle of ravenous birds, they were. On every corner the crowned
emperors of hip hop spat and shuffled and sold towels. Ghostface
Killah invited the fly bitches up onto the stage, he did. Raekwon
battled Indiana Jones, Jr on a bed of ancient Norman insects, the
juice of the eternal youth dribbling out of the Holy Pimp Goblet
or somesuch. Organic peanut earth fathers De La Soul went all big
band to invoke the warm feelings of wartime America and drew more
noise from the crowd than Zeus himself.
 Kings
of the undersprawl Animal
Collective
and
Atlas
Sound threw
down with tag team choreography, pouring out the beautiful chicken
soup swirl, sprinkling their crunchy electronical croutons. A
slick of onion jelly wafted across the shadows on the ceiling to
blanket our love. Battles
played
twice, the darlings, with queuing and wristband shenanigans, and
were sweat-enducing monsters. The dancepiss rippled from under my
hairline and down my back while The Cruntlin stood on a chair.
While we sniggered under our trucker caps regarding Dinosaur Jr,
when the time came, the strings wailed and we fell to our knees in
surf supplication before his Marshall stacks. Four Tet caused
delicate Friday night earthquakes. The one time we wandered into
Reds, The
Octopus Project,
who looked as though they might have licked things into a
fantastic sparkly shape, were holding charismatic court before
sweaty cheering individuals. Only the undirty asexual shmmering
unfilth of Stars
of the Lid
could
have concreted the lid on the bomb-blast, and luckily they came in
on their silver skateboards to finger aaaawwwwwll our yoghurts.
But
it wasn't all handjobs and antique bric-a-brac. Clinging to the
curtains like the sperm of a bad uncle, dangled the real doglog of
the week, Sunset
Rubdown,
who arrived scribbled on the back of an envelope from "Montreal,
Canada" together with stick figures of The Arcade Fire being
anal-raped by urban foxes, an envelope that something unfortunate
had used to wipe its arse.
But on the
whole, dear reader, the planets were in alignment and the gravity
was warm. By the time the road felt my tyres again, our souls had
been wire-woolled anew.
Who the
fuck wants to see Dr Jones get married anyway, with his war record
and crystal balls and everything?
Warm Golden Dolphins
Pulse Beautiful Future From The Trees of the Cosmos, Or Something
19 Mai
2008, 22:29 - Taurus Heights, West Deadsbury
Catch the
rainbows, my fruity little friends!
Beauteous
indeed were the winds that carried me to the shores of ATP this
month, beauteous and wet and sprinkled with nourishing salts. The
fair, egalitarian quads of magic Camber Sands one weekend; the
brooding, preening petit bourgeois focus of Minehead the
next: twin seahorses spitting their spines at the gates of chaos
for the benefit of all mankind and in order to restore my
quivering self.
 Firstly,
the miracle that had hung back for seven years unleashed its
unravelling hydrogen atoms from all those millions of miles away
and Camber came alive with outdoor chat and beach lounging. So
gorgeous was the weather it threatened to loosen the magnetic
bonds of sticky carpets completely and distract from all those
hairy dudes under the lights. Egg and myself performed ancient
Victorian rites at the beach with trousers rolled up to knees and
styrofoam containers bobbing about our dainty ankles. Much
drinking at picnic tables under dappled thoughts. Delicious
socialising outside party chalets dark as dirty fishtanks with
pissed up faces pressing against the glass. There was a
soundsystem called simply Williams, interrupted in his
ministrations by grumpy men in orange jackets. We were living in a
true sunshine republic, if only for a weekend, and even a visit to
Hastings A&E could not bend my dreams from the meandering joy
of the whole occasion. And that's without even mentioning the hot
indie chicks in bikinis that were there. How the musical comets
blazed!
 Hottest
amongst the miracles were
Times
New Viking,
a thundering torch from Ohio lighting up the world of scuzzpop,
jamming mics in the mouths of drummers everywhere, choking future
Phil Collins gorillas in puddles of their own piss.
Hot
Chip peered
down from their kitchenette mountaintops as always, streaking us
with their electric truth. (OK, so I went to bed sober on Friday
night rather than blow out my tankard chunks to the sociable
sounds of their DJ set; I was chasing the dragon of the moment.)
Les
Savy Fav
ticked
their way through a lot of crazy rock'n'roll boxes, but there was
too much Bohemian Messianic cockrel and not enough curious pigeon,
ya dig? Moidering drizzle from all corners of his beardy mouth.
Meat
Puppets
knitted
their desert sinews and drank their beers and gurned and coughed
dusty punky country genius. Dark in the heart with nothing but a
stuttering strobe for company, A
Place To Bury Strangers
scooped
the prize for best eighties noise revival, gripped in their
skag-weakened and yellowing teeth.
 Pissed
Jeans
skulked
about in their pants, having slipped out from the garage with a
keg of adolescent ape fury and a sweaty arsecrack.
Fuck
Buttons
finally
loomed into an actual musical experience from out of the foetid
drunken underglow of the previous Minehead brainclash, a
brainclash that left me with a flaming conviction of their
excellence without any residual detail. They wore powdered
rainbows in their dandy wigs, moles on their cheeks of ketamine
microdots. Or maybe they just stood about their machines, grinning
and rocking backwards and forwards slightly. Can't be sure what
happened. Ween
grimaced
and greased with sweaty, fretty fingers for three hours, but I
thankfully ducked out to the grasslands before the evil took hold.
Meanwhile, that sly lysergic Canuck
Caribou
was
a blur of drumsticks and childhood noises in the hot, dank
underspace, glimpses of sunlight passing through the trees of his
imagination. It ended.
Only to
spike up again, a tricky grass, a few days later under slower
skies and arguably even larger seagulls, the swirl of which
sometimes threatened to unplug the sun. Musical peaks steepled
maybe higher even than the Pitchfork feast, but the unilocal power
of the Quuuuuun Vic was missed, the social spark of the low-grade
housing of the Camber quad. And there was no sun. All was
conducted in subterrean gloom.
Pull up a
spew and wait for the facts, friends.
Welsh Pyramids Cure
Eye Cancer, Say Twats
26 Mawrth
2008, 22:50 - Hammer HQ, Manchorlton
Push up to
the jumper, baby!
Chastened
by our continued inability to make history on our terms, we have
crawled out of our foxholes and chewed on the napalm of our own
genius. We also used recording instruments to try and capture the
magic, in bringing "The Biggest Man With The Crying Hands"
to a new level, a level fit for vinyl release with The
Fountain,
we wouldst hope.
More
information will follow as we spit the pips under the pavement.
Secret To Time
Travel Discovered in 1987 Phone Directory
26 Mawrth
2008, 16:28 - Taurus Heights, West Deadsbury
Big watery
holes shimmer in our hearts
How
negligent we are in our duties! How profligate with our gifts! A
bunch of Chevy Chases we Hammers are, pissing away centuries of
accumulated culture on a lifestyle of expensive chips and cheap
motorcars. There are some grapes to be had from our continental
rumblings, some presents taken from under the tree for the future
to unwrap. You just have to trust us with some more of your
patience.
Our
clocks have been devoured in the pursuit of personal happiness
these past few monthlongs, dancing closer and closer to the flame
of self-fulfilment until our hair singed. iPods were bought and
consumed, Japan explored, old cars abandoned, pick-up trucks
ushered into our lives.  Master
Egg returned from South America, riddled with gout and syphillitic
sores, having fathered approximately eight thousand mini-Eggs from
Tierra del Fuego to the Caribbean. Days became weeks became
minutes became months, and the virtual dust on this virtual
scrubland grew in virtual heaps. The Singing Detective's bedside
table had nothing on us, great steaming bowls of flakes of
idleness stacked to the disapproving skies.
The good
news! Hammers have scored their thumbs and made a blood oath to
become something of a functioning band once more, though we walk
under the shadow of a busy, work-strewn calendar. Mondays are the
nights when the creatures of the musical lunge gather and scratch
their genitals in the street below our windows, straining their
kidneys to process the poison interwoven with the sounds to ward
off evil, process them before their nervous systems fail and they
dance as we intended. We pull the strings and the pavement buckles
with our industry. The council repair bills are getting
incremental!
These
sessions in turn are producing some sparkling beasts, an Egged-up
sharpening of our karaoke bowels to concert pitch. The numbers we
shat into our trembling fingers in Dorset and at Trof in October
have grown extra pairs of legs and lungs, assuming poses from al
manner of sexual and cultural manuals. Punk rock stance in the pub
car park, you know the thing. Zombies eat peanut butter with
renewed gluttony. The Fat Little Emperor has drifted off into an
odysseal space-jazz drift, steering the spaceplough with his
testicles, keeping an eye out for alien honeys to add to his
ancient Grecian harem. He's strewn with appetites, that lad.
Keyboards stack on one another, and the Hammers wail once again.
Documentary
evidence has been found in corners and crevices of the city. Fuel
in Withington bore witness to some
splintering Hammeraktion
as
we teamed up with The Generalissimos and
Cloud
Sounds,
the podcast of choice for the discerning diplomat. We really
kicked the doors in, I kid you not. Whoops were hollered;
eyelashes were fluttered demurely;stetsons would have been thrown
to the ceiling, but no cowboys were present. Once we have been
able to dislodge plugs from our crinkling arseholes, we will
commit a twinkling piece of genius to CS in the form of a  historic
jingle, something involving dulcimers, elepant trumpets and the
traumatising of a junkie toddler choir. Once we've developed a way
to record the sound of tumours breathing, we'll include that too.
Then
only last week, we staked a flag in the heart of north
Manchester's Bohemian fortress, Prestwich, walking the tarmac
where Mark E Smith saw hobgoblins and mystical evil in search of
top notch kebab food. We were there at the kind invitation of
Shangri-La,
who've polished paving stones in the area a good six or seven
times before, a stirling stew of performance poetry, quirk-laden
stand up and acoustic works. We applied some rock'n'roll nerve
pinch to their funny bones, though our glorious suavity before
gaping mouths in Withington was sharded inexplicably into ragged
splinters of wrong words, bad notes and logistical cripplements.
But we only missed out on the quiz by one point, and I managed to
squeeze in an accidental joke about Christ's Easter hi-jinks and
zombies.
More news
is on the way, my pretties. You just have to listen to your
ulcerous hearts.
Now, who
wants a hotdog?
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