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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.* Super Furry Animals - Rings Around the World (Sony) * Self-depreciation: she come easy; humility takes a little more work. |
Haps with the Chaps
Fat geese have circled the motionless air here at Hammer HQ, chortling at the lack of movement discerned by their dull,brown eyes. "These Hammers", they squawk, "display none of the verve or thirst for self-promotion that mark out knots of young men set for better things." A quick shotgun full of crossbow bolts stops their shit-stained beaks. Verminous sluts.
But evil remarks are the grease that grinds the parts of the most successful engines, and this birdly nonsense is no different. Inspired by 24 Hour Party People last night (no, not really), Hammerseed has been dispersed into the atmosphere with demo discs sent to London, to British Columbia (where the cocaine is made of tea leaves) and Los Angeles in an attempt to spread the net and catch more dragonflies.
Meanwhile,
Polytechnic are racking up the news, gobbet after gobbet piling up on the kitchen table like discarded Henrician party favours. More airplay, another opening slot on tour with
Doves (drawing to a close in Glasgow this very night) and the role of Penelope to various ardant expense-accounted executive types. Winter is biting hard into the flesh of their dreams, and drawing warm, hopeful blood. The sound in Llandudno bay created by Polydoves last Saturday sent the Great Orme shifting and sliding off into the Sea in imitation of thousands of icebergs, until it crashed into the Manx citadel of Douglas, killing several million commandos who had been breeding and amassing on the rockface like guillemots, hijacking ferries and developing weapons of massed intention with a view to invade the Britannic North West and lay the dirty brass law of Mannan over us all. A happy accident all will agree.
The last Sunday of November saw both Hammers and Teknik pincer the underground sun with sets at the lovely Auto Test Pilot. Itching within the collar of their 15 minute set, and observed by Chris of the Swamp, we spat and swallowed until only the true whores in the crowd understood what was happening. O, we weaved tales of Cincinatti, of boats, of pigeons, of Motown longing and distaste, and while Coc Oen did not feel he vaulted across the spectrum as thoroughly as he would've liked, it went good.
Polytechnic hummed and hawed with such grace and shrieking joy that the light fittings grew dim with jealousy. Envelopes rose up and gummed themselves with a curious melding of sexual salt and celestial intent. In fact, every turn that night was a lecture in excellence. Ed Barton towered,
Band(ism) spat granite, the swampy
Duke Garwood tangled us up in dark, complex, bluesy mutterings; and even the plastic spun betwixt was pure stuff.
Hovering in the corner of our eyes are some glittering magpie intentions, arcing over now into 2006. The TwoKayPlusFunf has been such a genial host to us and ours this year, that we are further metalled with galvanised resolve to polish our non-turds even harder in the ZeroSix and blow our chaffy goodness into more eyes and ears over coming months.
As such.
Consider the future as a Scalectrix track. We stand surrounded by sparks at the confluence of two speeding figure-8 destinies, that of Polytechnic meeting that of the ears of keen-minded lovers of music everywhere.
First feet fall on the Longcut/Polytechnic tour this very day; a short tour written large in the sky by rockets and roman candles. They begin in Nottingham's Rescue Rooms tonight, then scuttle from station to station like hairy Bowies, taking in Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol, London's Cargo and cruising the Mancunian Way on golden-trumpeted chariots to play at K2 on Oxford Road, Manceinion on 8th November. If The Longcut weren't enough of a reason for treason, then the heft and deft weft of Boys Poly, Inc. must paw at the straw until the senseless rhyming ceases and you decide to go to the gig.
As a quick, unexpected warm up for this nationwide fever, Polytechnic were called upon to walk unto the breach and substitute themselves for whichever glamourpuss nomarks were originally slated to help Eavis-approved wunderchilds, The Subways, make punky rock sandwiches at the Big Academy on Wednesday night. Screaming, creaming teenage hordes smashed their inhibitions on the floorboards, as the golden stand-ins shook the emergency break glass from their manes and raised lightning rod fingers to the growling deusphere. And in return the heavens leaked down a new hero, birthing fluids pouring from his intelligent brow, to put fingers and thumbs to keyboards. Polytechnic just got that bit Poly'ier.
We trust that you all celebrated National Zombie Day on Monday with grace, aplomb, carefully applied raw meat and a daring costume that titillated excitement in all the right places. Now, mind those sparklers, kids!
Hir oes i Bolytecnig! Hir oes i Forthwylion Gofalus!
Excitement encircles us like an electrified hula hoop, friends! Three sizeable and momentous chunks of Polytechnic-shaped news have fallen to Earth, leaving smouldering craters to snare the unwary. The Barlow Moor Road glows with special love.
News lump #1: Polytechnic are featured twice in this week's New Waxcylinder Express. First they are pictured (sans S(t)u(t)chbury) before the slutty kitchen nonsense of Peel
News lump #2: Scary indie twiglet
Stephen Q Lamacq scratched the letters P, O, L, I, T, E, K, N, I and K all over the airwaves on Monday night on his pikey Radio One show. We could only hear the 'net-based echoes of this shiniest of all events as we had been banging knuckles with the future at Club NME, where The Manyskilled have now taken residence for the next month or so.
News lump #3: You may fear that this whole site is turning totally
P**********; but it's all genuinely pumping our stumps to see and hear our streetmates getting their props. Come November, the clouds will twist to carve the passage of Polytechnic and their first national tour. Fellow Mancoids,
The Longcut, have invited them to hold hands and wander barefoot across the autumnal meadows of Scotland and England, playing loud music all the while.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will know all this already, of course; but the kestrel-toed sometimes need a little leading to the water. Stoop and drink, you sticky soaps!
Listen soft and you hear the fleshy creak of Der Teknik being taken to the bosom of the massed dreamers.
We are still perched on our familar misshapen furniture waiting for an eviction notice to land squatly on our post mat here at the Towers after a megatonic, thrashy rush of laser-pointed entertainment. The rescue operation has been completed and the tidemarks of beery fun scrubbed from the walls and chairlegs. But the memorial thorns still pluck at our aortas, bringing our hot blood to spread over our cool, mammalian skins.
Stones rolled down the kitchen table faster and faster as
Milkthief stacked themselves on top and tobogganed with skill as though computer generated using silver valves and four-foot transistors. Monumental and vivid in equal
How could the evening have been complete without a word or two from our vicious hosts, our indifferent selves? Completed more shortly. Shackle the rams and
No idea if John Peel would have approved of what went on; but our feet were in the right place.
Our faces have been freshly laundered, our faces exfoliated and our hair platted together with spun gold. The unbouncers won't turn any wrong-lookers away, so buff up your pumpkins of death and climb our greasy stairs to
Around 9pm, the Manchorlton Cross will smoulder with a knotty crowd of Peelistas, gathered together to hoist a thought for He Who Cannot Be Overstated. Boomjet's fuzzy excitement will gather in the sink. Ed Barton will scowl about the corners of the rooms, brandishing lyrical quills at the wary and unwary alike. Milkthief will hang around the fridge with adrenalin turning their blood to yoghurt. Robin Nature Bold will soak the curtains with his blood red cries.
Around about the time the pubs will empty out, Polytechnic will urge radiators to their knees and hoover up all available excitement in the room. Then finally headlining in their own kitchen, Delicate Hammers spit their teeth and carve their prayers into the linoleum.
If you find yourself kicking around the South Manchester wastelands, why not chuck a coconut at our stall? The Flat Above has the medals, you bring the chests to pin them upon.
It's a great way of getting a blank cheese sandwich thrust under your face.
The earth has rolled around a few times since the report was due, dearest indulgers; but finally we deign to let you in on our Salfordian ITC experiences of last weekend.
Battling tree crabs cleared a path for our sandal-shod feet through the broken dogshit and freshly-strewn brown Initial gobbets of dullard Manc grind were endured through gritted eyes as whole turdlets of yellowing filth slopped out from the stage from behind miserable green doors. Thin, wafer thin strips of purpose dissolving in their blind ambition. One man actually had effects pedals for feet, which is nowhere as good as it sounds.
Divided only by a waxy void of Kentucky Fried Soul music,
The Whip spilled their electrically hormonal punk guts all over the floor. The room filled with a pungent and acrid cloud of intellectual sex gas as a roomful of hotties shook their pieces to the repetitive blues-based rhythms. Did their brothers and sisters know what these trendy harlots and bentcocks were up to? It was synthy, snarling throwback to the slowly staler days of Nylon Pylon, from whose gaping brainloins this thumping Athene leapt.
The Polytechnic took to the boards as record people spat on their hands, ready to gum them up with a special deal. The ginger face of a Radio One DJ was spotted skulking in the smoky gloom. The Manchorlton Horde ranked themselves across the stage front area and charged the crowd like riot police with their gas masks on back to front. The Poly tore beams from the ceiling as we've come to expect. The insouciance ran down their trouser legs and hardened into lumps in our throats. It was sweet indeed.
Everyone went upstairs to queue at the primary school toilets upstairs and Working for a Nuclear Free City just seemed to happen in isolation. Someone mentioned whimsy, and put it on a bad table under a dark, dark lamp for all to see.
A day or two Steve Lamacq was kicking his own skinny arse on Radio 6 for not having been there. But he played an early demo version of Pep on his show. A seed plunged into the salty magma of the earth?
Death to the unfidel!
It wasn't until the fourth bus had pulled away from Chorlton Cross empty that I realised the queues of people were waiting for our window to open.
Bare-breasted maidens with strawberries in their hair had been calling up to us for weeks on end, their voices cracked and splintered as a bad parquet floor. Soiled babies had been clawing their way up the side of Delicate Towers unseen, tiny ninjas with hate in their toothless gums. My attention tended to arc back to the bare-breasted maidens in all honesty, but the babies freaked me out not a little.
Magpies, bluejays and light brown pigeons sauntered down from the aerosphere and settled on the windowframe, eyeing me with a combination of suspicion and erotic fascination. (I have a way with the feathered legions.) I retired to my quarters and rummaged about in my underconscious, until I plucked from beneath my cool pillow a CD-R demo compiled in a spirit of affectionate haste.
Handsome Nick and his benighted cohort, The Intermittent Gary Nip, had rolled the sweat from their hairy shoulders into a doughy substance before pummelling it into the form of a demo cover. Yes, for a demo - you needn't lift your upper faces with surprise, you tiny-shanked peasants.
The avian fleet seized the initiative and forked between the chunky cummulus to find the dirtpot offices that snake like snakes all over the country, bleeding their poisonous taste diktats into the eyes and ears of oaken-hearted youth everywhere. We plan to slip our neurotoxic bass clefs into the thinking water. No-one will be safe, but all will be eager.
I kissed the crowd with my dreams and their bloody gratitude clotted the drains.
Soon this dictatorial fever will pass and my body will shrink to mansize, so we must act quickly!
Stop up their mouths, and make them your hounds!
Fingers have been moving at great speed since the dogs with the faces of European men returned from the Afrocentre.
On Saturday the 1st October, the peeping buds of the most melancholically sweet of months, the New Islington Mill hosts a near cataclysmic cataclysm of event. Polytechnic will wipe the sweat of hurried attention from their beady forehead and flex strings under their will, in support of Working For A Nuclear Free City. It's a
Blowoutevent, darkened with the berry stains of past successes including the Southern Hotel Summer Spectacular reported some weeks past.
Breathing hard on the scented ankles of this triumph, the planets have coagulated to form the possibility of yet another Group Hug: this time in honour of He Who Cannot Be Forgotten,
John Peel.
We will throw our doors open to the fragrant populace on October 13th, a Thursday, which is the new Friday night as all hold to be self-evident. It will cost nothing, which is as good as free, and bands will stack in the kitchen like syrupy pancakes.
Peel Hug will see the lazy-eyed grunge-scented debut of enigmatic Egg project, Boomjet. Hammers will play. Polytechnic will play. Milkthief may shuffle on their slinky coil and poke out some notes.
The important things to remember are: a) it's all about love of the stuff; and b) it's Autumntide, when everyone likes to open up the party cans and enjoy themselves. And each other, eh Jerry?
Eat it up like oysters, ye gods!
They have returned unto us once again,
Zambeze river cruised with booze, rhinos wrestled, walls built from sheer concrete imagination and the Egyptian lorries rumbled on their Mad Max adventure to the Cape. It was a dreaming time, and these Hammers carved themselves from the compacted red dust into the form of rakish cowboys, quaffing quinine and dallying with crazed ladies of the long, long night.
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Meanwhile the viral action of NME was already slowly plastering the hungover post-Peel Hug faces across the nation's underthoughts. Scary indie twiglet Steve Lamacqdaddy scrawled bizarre, yet very enthusiastic, musings on our Barlow Moor Bastards all across his mighty column. (Does that read wrong to you?) He felt vibes, he did. Jazzy rugs, alternative medicine and Grandaddy, none of which quite made sense to any of us. But it is all good, this broadcasting thing.
Have you ever noticed how all the metaphors are based on animals and liquids? These are the elemental forces of scuzzy, primal self-expression. Many animal expressions gushed into jubilant pouring on Thursday night in the concrete uberbunker we call The Flat Above. A milky, orange cloud of love for One Man Who Left The Wirral, with attendant micro-cloudlets of love for the assembled arms and legs. The inaugral and august Peel Hug sat its dirty arse on the spreadsheet of history with inebriated and heavy grace.
It started wisely with the most logical set from Robin Nature-Bold and his Band(ism), creeping amongst the Honey Nut
BoomJet then emerged as Aphrodites from the coastal wash of their own musical sperm and grew to total size before our trembling faces. Grunge was the word, wailing were the guitars, mumbled were the vocals. The walls closed in with deadly accuracy and wood turned to gold and sulphur. Alchemy, alche-you. All clapped and cheered and slapped their newborn arses to show their approval.
The smoke thickened into a soup of destiny as shaggy Behemoths Polytechnic stepped out from page 22 of this week's NME and into our domestic bliss. Whatever wounds may have screamed before they played sealed themselves and glowed with health. A balloon inflated and included the room until the cupboards ran over with the justice of it all. A Peel Session was ripped from the realm of the impossible and Gaffa-taped into the white-goods graveyard of our galley. A big cuddly, bearded, softly-spoken pater musicalis threw down ladders of lightning and invited us to climb up into our higher selves and breathe in the view. Years matted together, forming a dense rainbow of nostalgic strands, bending time and place together into a pulsing bag of giant archetypes. All this happened in about four songs. Search your souls and you'll remember that I'm right.
restrain the goats, your daughters are in town and the Hammers are spitting their alternatives into the gene pool! Fingers found notes never played in quite that order before, brains and mouths floated past each other in pools of disconnected bliss. The piss and vinegar dissolved the barriers in Coc Oen's brain and a sourmash of non-sequiturs and unremembered pulp spewed from his cerebral cortex. One night a drunken lizard, a broken general of a lead-handed army. Your ingentle hosts stopped and started, stretching the drunken bonds they and the room of humans shared to shredding point. In short, a six-course dog's banquet. A sticky shame crusted in my eyes the next morning.
Peel Hug.
bottles and we found the door. Small lumps of worn plastic opened our hearts to the joy of raffled beer and we in turn opened our mouths to its cheeky splendour.
I opened the Ceaucescu windows of our intimidating fortress and stepped out onto the balcony. With the traditional Mayday celebrations a warm, sweaty collection of memories, the cleaning staff hadn't visited the balcony in some time. The communiques would be stern and the recriminations swift. But the joy in the throats of the assembled melted my iron mood and I thought a benevolent gesture was required.
Firstly, the anointed Polytechnic have lifted their cassocks from the besmirching tide and set their sandals at the top of Mount Good. In the City is choking the air around us like a horrible Manc poison but they are dancing on the clouds like the many-fingered deities they are. Their dance whips the candy-floss nimbus into shapes to amaze and distract. City traffic slams to a sudden halt. For a moment, thumbs pause on the redial Claims Direct button until everyone realises that this the spinach for which we've all been hungry. Look at it! It's massing into statues and public monuments.
the Goat and the Lord: drunk as lordly goats on their own intercontinental excitements and purified of their incontinent excrements by Mother Africa's milky chicken goodness.