Bleached Hem

WERRRLD CUP

2010-07-28T00:36:00.000+01:00

England have actually managed to score a goal. It’s all the city needs in order to poison itself further than it needs to, and every street corner is being propped up by a bleary eyed disheveled football fan pissing on his own shoes.

A weak retaliation to World Cup events features the involvement of taping bin bags to windows like a teen goth blotting out the World, and projecting a movie onto a white sheet in the office until all the unpleasantness outside dies down.

Which is doesn’t. Obviously. It’s England, for fuck sake, and as thus everyone decided to skive off work early, get on the bevvies mid afternoon and watch some overpaid ignoramus’ boot a ball around a bit of grass in a bleak fit of faux-patriot flag waving.

We’re in a noodle bar. 10pm. A pissed up scouse couple bounds in addressing each other with slurs and the kind of volleying pent up insults which must develop months into a relationship with a person who thinks a noodle ‘is like spaghetti but with, like, chinese stuff on it’. Christ.

The waiter approaches them, he talks in broken English - as do they - but for very different reasons.

The only comprehensible part of the exchange is that they want two beers.

No beer. Ran out. Have tea. Water.

YER’VE RAN OUT OF BEER?

Yes. All gone. Sorry.

YER SERIOUS?

Yis.

ALRIGHT THEN. FUCKIN’ELL. WE’LL HAVE TWO...WHAT DID YOU SAY YOU HAD? FANTAS? WE’LL HAVE THEM.

He brings over two generous glasses of tap water, and returns to the counter with a look of worry on his face.

Eh love, what the fucksthis?

FANTA. ALL THEY HAD.

Why’s it see through, like?

MAYBE ITS ‘OW THEY MAKE IT OVER THERE.

Over where?

YOU KNOW. CHINA LIKE...

The waiter is passed a tray from the kitchen. I busy myself with a mountain of noodles, pretending to have some control over chop sticks, but two pints in and I’m inexplicably bloody drunk. There’s soy sauce everywhere. I want to turn around to watch, but fear getting a glass of ‘china-fanta’ thrown over me head.

I hear him put the tray down.

WHATS THIS LOVE?

Starter. Sea-weed.

OH RIGHT. YER. TAAA....

They dig into it with cluttering, clattering, cutlery which sounds like it’s being used by a donkey wearing boxing gloves.

The waiter hasn’t even got back to the counter when...

WHAT THE FUCKS THIS? EH! WAITERRR!

His shoulders drop and he returns to the table. The noodle bar is silent.

THIS SPINACH IS DEAAD SALTY, LAD.

Seaweed. Dish are seaweed, not spinach.

YER WHA?? SEA WHAT? IT’S FUCKING SALTY.

It normal. Seaweed salty.

IT’S FUCKING DISGUSTIN’ MATE. TAKE IT AWAY, THAT IS FUCKIN - UUURGGH - VILE, THAT.

He returns it to the counter. There’s a hubbub about in the kitchen. Someone is shouting.

Back at the table, the couple are fighting again.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR FUCKIN FACE?

My face? What’s wrong with your fuckin face? Pyaar sour mug on you, gerrl.

FUCK OFF. IM TEXTING SOMEONE.

Who? Who yer fucking texting at this hour?

NONE OF YER BUSINESS, IS IT? GET YER GRID OUT OF ME FUCKIN FACE.

Shut the fuck up. Yer doing me head in tonight.

I’M DOIN YOUR FUCKIN HEAD IN? YOU’RE THE ONE THAT PISSED ON YOUR FUCKING SHOES EARLIER, YER GOBSHITE.

The waiter returns, sheepishly.

You leave now, sorry.

YER WHA?

You leave. No charge. Just go, please.

YOU ARE NOT FUCKIN KICKING US OUT!?

Please, no swear. Go now.

He opens the door. The girl stumbles up, sways for a while, swallows a small bit of vomit by the looks of it and looks at her boyfriend who’s attempting to tie his laces for the journey outside.

FUCK OFF. WHATS A FUCKIN NOODLE ANYWAY? WOULDN’T WANT TO EAT ‘ERE. CMON BABES, LET’S FUCKIN GO.

She slides out of the place in a diagonal motion - her head closer to the floor than her fucking shoulders.

Her boyfriend finally staggers up. He shakes the waiters hand and pats him on the back.

Alright lerd, alright. Going now.

A fork falls out of his pocket.

Shit.

Him and the waiter stare it at for a good five seconds, then stare at each other, and then back to the fork, all in complete silence. The man surveys the rest of the gawping customers in the restaurant and then stares back at the fork. He picks it up and puts it back in his pocket as though no-one can see him.

I’ll just take me fork, and leave, lad.

The door slams after him like a forced applause following a bad joke.

The waiter does a small victory dance behind the counter and smiles at everyone.

Fuck England.

Stig Noise MMX & Barberos split EP launch @ Wolstenholme Creative Space

2010-07-27T12:29:00.004+01:00

Oh, Wolsteholme Creative Space. You beautifully grotty little wonder. It’s perhaps one of the few spaces in Liverpool which manages to be colder indoors than outdoors in Winter, and blisteringly, brutally hot in the questionable British Summertime.

A lasciviously open and blank canvas of a space, it holds the kinds of performances which leave you staggering out of the place at God knows what time in the fucking morning trying desperately to cram receipts of brain matter back into your skull which have been badgered and blown out by a treatise of bands hours previous.

Tonight is one of those sublime brain-matter-scatter-nights. A total treat. And despite a sardine-crammed line up of excellence (including Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, Spirit Animals, Pariah Qarey...), we somehow only manage to properly catch two of the fervent applause anticipant bands on offer.

Fuck. Blame it on alcohol urgencies, rum brain deliriums and the fact that the place is packed out with every favourite person you owe a high five and a sequence of cackle wielding banter to.

Shit happens when you wander off for a quick piss only to discover a half hour queue and an upstairs room full of people too caught in the cross fires of conversation to make it back downstairs to the actual gig.

Still, Stig Noise MMX and Barberos are divine treats enough.

Stig, as ever, are their usual onslaught of brass, gut pounding drums, distortion, and pseudo-psycho-composures of riffs. Guttural grind ramblings of vocals and whimsical, diametric melodies wound up into tight, bold statements of shredding, bombastic scores are as ever, irresistible, and a mainstay of their prowess.

The crowd’s an odd mixture, mind. Seems we’re not the only ones with a rum swamp for a think tank, but at least the majority of us can handle our ale. For those that can’t, staggering, knee hitching dance moves, attempts to sweep whoever, wherever, off their feet where they stand and general flailing about at horizontal angles seems to be the only way some of the crowd feel able to interpret Stig Noise’s own personal riot.

There’s men in suits reeling off archaic chat up lines to many a poor broad mid set, who look as though they got a bit lost on their way to The Pleasure Rooms.

But fuck it, by the time Hearts Of Gold/ Gobs Of Shite plays out to tie a tidy, lovesome bow to the end of Stig’s gutter-waltz set you couldn’t give a shit that some gobshite in a John Lewis ‘original’ is butting into your side like a rhino trying to escape a fucking zoo.

A good hour and a half bridges the gap between these fine fellows and Barberos, in which the seemingly multiplying crowd crams into a back room to catch a glimpse of Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. Theres people gawping through windows, stood on chairs, tables and people, leering through gaps wherever they can find them.

But booze, piss and smoke missions hinder what was obviously, at least in some part, a must see performance. I’m a dickhead for not paying enough attention. Let’s just leave it at that and move on...

Barberos then. Four fine young men with a fetish for full body silver spandex (who doesn’t share that fetish? Come on), cacophony and beating drums hard enough for BDSM enthusiasts to lip bitingly be urged to scream out their ‘safe’ word, take to the stage before a hungry, tanked up, piled in crowd.

Fuck. Me. It’s. Good. A dystopian noise scramble of brain digging which ventures between malevolent sound scores of the satisfyingly viscous and toe curling sublime, all framed by back screen visuals of discordance and facial squirm play.

They’re the noise of nights bled hedonistically into early mornings, of searing sunrise in wrung out pupils, of a brain squirming inside the skull perilously drying itself foul of chemicals, rapid and inane thought processes and spirit soaked alarm bells.

A barrage of manipulated doom siren synth, and dual drummers in place of vocal and word heavy vocalists, the narrative of the set is hell bent on staggering, insufferable rhythm, the lost laconic, the fevered, the unrelenting.

The crowd is understandably sick for it. A bleating united urge of beat grabbing mass who holler throughout, pounding palm to palm excitably, and refuse to surrender at the will of each songs end.

Fucking hell, the drums are ridiculous. Ferociously charged, they’re succinct to the beatings of unimaginable pace. Are feral and incessant - the heaviest, most beautifully aggressive poundings which go off on unreal tangents which seem to have a dialect and vocabulary of a language you only wish your lover’s tongue could learn.

So good it’s almost exhausting. But who wants to sleep after that? Fuck. That.

We cheekily procured a copy of the Stig Noise MMX vs Barberos split EP on vinyl, and strongly urge you all to get yer grubby mitts on a copy.

You’ll wanna experience em both live, but as a 4AM backing soundtrack of discord to discord (if that’s what you’re into, like...), this is the best you’re gonna get without attempting to smuggle them into your living room after a few too many rounds of escapist snacks.

True Story. Get onto it.

Buy said amazing EP here...

Stig Noise MMX: http://www.myspace.com/stignoise

Barberos: http://www.myspace.com/barberosmusic

Trash

2010-07-15T22:44:00.002+01:00

It was one stain on the floor.

One crimson blush.

It wouldn’t budge.

She’d used every commercially celebrated cleaning apparatus on the market - if the kitchen had been a body, it would have been scrubbed and exfoliated in such harsh detail as to draw it down to the bone.

She could see her reflection in every veneer.

Except for the crimson blush on the fucking floor.

He was out in the shed. His fingers had fallen off by now. His toes gnawed by fuck knows what, probably rats, possibly decay. His face was gone. His mouth hung off. It had been raining a lot. Who knew what the fuck went on when you were buried in a place like that.

He’d crept in through the window a month ago. She knew him. A little. Enough to share a moment of questionable merit between the both of them when he’d woken her up, blind drunk on whatever, tripping over the mantle.

Initially, she felt humiliated. It was a ridiculous impulse, she knew. Of all the things she could have been scared of or worried about in that moment, it was the state of her bedroom, the underwear she was sleeping in, the dried up make up on the pillow - which bothered her the most.

She hadn’t cleaned for months. There was a breadcrumb path leading up to the bed of old, crusty underwear torn off in the midst of misjudged dalliances, used johnnies, shredded stockings.

There were books left open at pages which declared boldly her mindset, her gnawing ache.

There were half eaten sandwiches, abandoned mid bite.

There was a belt still buckled to the steel headboard where her wrists, neck, and ankles had been shackled and snagged. She always picked the men who would willingly abandon her. And like Houdini, she’d wriggle free, course with the stench of a used companion, and sit on her bed contemplating what to do now she was free.

And now he was in her room. And he was standing there. He saw everything. And she was humiliated.

He was rotten from rain. Decayed, like a soiled notebook.

It was a challenge, like the moment an opponent pulls out the first fist, and you have a split second to choose whether to dive out the fucking way or duke it out.

She did nothing.

It was the most romantic thing she could have imagined.

He merely walked over. His stench infusing into every one of her senses, even her fucking sight was watered by it, her hearing dulled by the pounding of her sickened heart.

He dragged his nose across her thighs. Her stomach. Her tits. Her ribs. Her neck. Her ears. He settled between the frozen applause of her snatch, sniffing like a dog finding a discarded crumb of a dinner round the back of the bins.

She stroked his scalp, sticky and wet, she found his face, half torn and flaking, his vacant eye socket. She shoved a finger inside and he purred with approval.

She was bleeding herself, and he began lapping it up.

She pulled her foot under his t-shirt and found a gash by his ribs, and probed her foot the whole way through. She found his still heart. His weeping chamber of what used to be.

She knew him. He lived in the house at the back of hers, and at night he’d sit by the back window and stare out.

She never closed the blinds.

He never closed the blinds.

Every act in that room of hers was a performance, and he saw every movement.

But she was still ashamed to have him here, like a fan stepping foot on the set of the movie they knew every mechanic of, she knew the illusion would be shattered. The fantasy over. It was all lighting and scripted and propped and caricatured to fucking perfection.

She couldn’t judge him in his current state. We all went this way eventually, she realised, and at least he’d managed to crawl back through death and offer himself to her, finally.

She wished she had a cock to shoot herself up into him with - to solder his insides with every volume of her lust.

He was fascinated by the beat of her body. The orchestral thrum. She was a funeral march.

She pulled at his skin. She sucked at his fingers, until his index dropped out in her mouth like a refrigerated pacifier. She peeled the flesh from his shoulders and carved her name into the bone.

She gave head to his hollow eye socket, and nibbled at his lips - spitting out fragments of pout and blush.

He made love to her the only way he knew how - by inhaling every inch of her that he could, by digesting every fluid, by petting everything which strutted out the life which he’d now lost.

But everything has it’s expiry.

His was long before now, but theirs was this instant, in a bouquet of projectile, gory crimson, like a bride tossing the flowers out at the next in line for matrimony.

He convulsed and withered. He stopped.

She dragged his body downstairs like a bag of trash. A trail of innards and flesh and blood and loss, curdling against linoleum.

Exhausted, she left him on the kitchen floor and sat up on the counter top. She found cigarettes. She lit a few. Smoked a few. She stared at the body. She stared at the blood on her foot. She could still taste him.

She missed the fuck out of him.

She fell asleep on his caving chest - his decaying steeple of ribs pillowing her fractured rest, before throwing him in the shed amongst the rest of the junk she’d accumulated over the years and never looked back at.

No-one could ever know.

It was fucking romance, and it was gone.

Friday Night On The 82 Bus Home

2010-07-10T11:03:00.006+01:00

Piss-ant stumbles aboard. Can smell his cider potency from the middle row of seats I've stumbled myself on.

The man in front of me keeps sneezing and wiping his germs on the back of the seat in front of him. I keep my hands to myself. I levitate off the seat, just in case I catch anything. I'll levitate the fuck off the bus later, too, just to be fucking sure. The 82 is riddled like an auld rat.

Piss-ant sits in the disabled seat, facing the rest of the bus, like a burnt out performer taking to the stage and re-living his glory years of packed out dive bars and high fives and cheers.

EH, DRIVEERRR! CAN YER GIVE US A SHOUT WHEN WE'RE NEAR THE 24 HOUR OFFY, LAD?

The driver slows down the bus. What was that lad? 24 hour? Yer mean on Park Road, yeah?

YEEAAH, SOMEWHERE.

He scans the faces in front of him, realising everyone's clocked him in his scruffiest hour. His binge peak.

'OOO WANTS A DRINK? COME'EAD.

He pulls out a Tesco bag with a bottle of wine inside and takes a big gulp.

The germ fest in front of me, shakes his head in dismay, and pissed out of his skull himself slurs: Aaah, lad, put it away lad. Don't be doing that to yourself. Don't be...err...put it away.

He punctuates with belches. The piss-ant gawps at him and spits some wine out all over himself like a try hard punk arriving in London twenty years too fucking late. Get off the fucking stage, lad.

PUT IT AWAY?? NARR LAD. DYER WANT SOME YERSELF, DO YER? he starts punching his own head WELL THEN CRACK ME OPEN. IT'S ALL LIQUID IN 'ERE. he continues bashing his head in AAAALLL LIQUID!! He screams, laughing.

A woman with a Marks&Spencer bag at the front of the bus gets up and moves to sit at the very back. Must think she's the fucking queen.

The piss-ant curls up into the corner of his seat and starts singing to himself. His words stagger listless points of thought which sound like they're rumbling round his liquidated brain like a pinball with no-one pushing the flipper.

THERE MIGHT BE A KEBAB SHOP OPEN. YER. KEBAB. BIT GREASY THOUGH. BOSS THOUGH. FIVER THAT. CHICKEN KEBAB! YIIIRRRSE. GET A CHICKEN KEBAB. he laughs to himself CH-CH-CH-CHICKEN, CHICKEN-LICKEN. LITTLE CHICKEEEE. IN ME BELLIEEE.

Germ fest in front of me staggers up for his stop. He shakes the hand of Piss-ant as he's leaving.

Y'alright lad. You take it easy, yerr? Have a safe one.

YOU TOO LAD. YOU TOO.

He get's off the bus and cracks open a can of Super Tenants. Fuckin hell, everyones on it. This is how the World ends. Friday night on the fucking 82 bus.

Eee'yarr lad. The offy's coming up.

MEGGAAA! TA DRIVER.

Piss-ant quivers up from his seat - a walking turd - and stands by the door. He spots the offy - it's nearly midnight and it's got a bigger queue than was spotted on the same street not too long ago for voting.

THERE IT IS! OFFY!!

The bus drives a little while further to get to the bus stop, piss-ant panics.

WHERE YER FUCKIN GOIN, LAD? LET ME OUT!! YER GOIN MIIIILLES OFF! FUCKSAKES.

The driver stops and piss-ant jumps off and starts running like a kid spotting an ice cream van after school.

The bus is silent and still, and all I can smell is the booze on my own breath.

The Temps @ Liverpool O2 Academy July 3

2010-07-07T12:01:00.010+01:00

Photos by Matt Thomas: http:mattthomas.co.uk

Fuck knows when it happened, but somewhere between Korova opening and Korova burning down (farewell dear scumfest) people forgot how to have actual fucking FUN at gigs.

No-one thrashes around anymore, punches don't get thrown, spit is no longer exchanged between audience and band, limbs don't get broken half as much as they used to be, stages remain in tact, and I can't even remember the last time I left a gig with spatters of someone else's vomit sprayed on the front of my shoes / t-shirt/ dress/ jeans.

Audience interaction lately seems to amount to only so much as a delicate arse wiggle, foot shuffle, a determined stiffly enforced pout of the lips and a nod of the head. Fuckin'ell.

So it was with warm, elated, heart charged delight that thrashing, stage destruction, vomit, and - 'someone outta get the emergency services on call just in case , shit is gonna go down'- plain recklessness was witnessed at the O2 Academy courtesy of The Temps.

Rampant with the kind of energy, brute force and power which could probably peel the stubborn leathery hide off Iggy Pop's insurance salesman withering bones, The Temps are the fuck off boot that this city / country has been in desperate need of for quite some time now. Experiencing them live is like being kicked brutally awake, and realising you've slept through the past six years or so of weak attempts at live shows.

Guitars and bass are brutal and fluid, every note sounds charged, every riff so sharp you can practically feel em breaking the skin and dancing through every one of your nerves - drums are magnetic and forceful, a skin bash self-applause of what are without a doubt some scarringly catchy tunes (look out for The Lesson, Electrolytes and Who Are They (To Say) ).

The audience is ape-shit. It's the way audiences used to be before someone decided it was anti-etiquette to stop caring if you elbow someone in the face behind you whilst you lose your fucking cool, mind and body to a band. There are pits of lads at the front of the stage going f-u-c-k-i-n-g-m-e-n-t-a-l.

IS RIGHT. About time, like.

Frontman Joey is perilously engaging - if he were to jump off a fucking cliff, you would follow. If he were to stick his hand in the fire, you'd willingly join him in searing the flesh off your own paw. Darting around the stage, he climbs the barriers, climbs the walls, thrashes himself about the place, fucks the scene up, vomits everywhere at one point and spits beer out all over proceedings when he realises he's taken a swig of the fit-juice right before a crucial riff - and boys gotsta dance, even he does receive a minor electric shock from the act.

He keeps up a strong dialogue with the audience - his thick accent framing a number of self-deprecating and t-shirt worthy statements, including inciting the whole audience to chant 'F-T-T' at him for a whole minute, before joining in himself - 'Fuck-The-Temps-Fuck-The-Temps---'

They're hard to keep tabs on - and it's hard to know who to keep your eye on, or what'll happen next. Songs play with structure - jolting silence into the middle of songs before blasting out a second half, performing with all their heart ruthless, raw slabs of the sort of angry, dark garage-punk which is as close to perfection as it may ever get.

You'd be a fucking idiot to miss any of their live shows. Seriously.

Destined. For. Greatness.

The Temps Myspace: http://myspace.com/thetempsliv

Ladykiller

2010-07-06T10:04:00.008+01:00

I'm a murderer. Proper bad one, me. Destroyed a whole family once. Didn't even have to try - I did it in one quick, sharp, move, so skilled and secretive and laissez faire that not a single person in that packed out cafe managed to witness it.

Fuck knows how old I was, but it was the Summer right before puberty hit. Right before I ballooned up like the prize heifer at a pig farm, right before hormones restricted all the oxygen to my brain and made me stupid enough to think particular boys had any interest in me, right before heartbreak, right before responsibility, right before Nickelodeon and MTV started their downward descent to shitsville, right before the awful, stinking, bleeding and the once budding, then blossomed tits which outcasted me from all my male friends.

Puberty, I'd worked out, was a vile, horrific penance for a vile, horrific act I'd recently committed.

We were in Blackpool on holiday - the working class' Paris, tower and all - and sat in a greasy spoon by the beach. That Summer what could only be described as a plague of Ladybirds had swamped the town like an outbreak of acne over every building, window, grain of sand, paving stone, fairground ride and tram. They were everywhere.

At any one time you would find at least four of the insects crawling about on your tee.

We'd just eaten and I was sipping on a coke, my brother playing on a Game Boy beside me, my parents opposite, when I leaned myself on the windowsill behind me and felt a damp, minor crunch beneath my elbow.

I froze. I tried to imagine every vile, frightening scenario as to what the squidgy crunch could have been - a shrunken head, a mouth full of teeth left abandoned on the side with gums like off fruit, a tiny egg of a miniature being, a bubble full of blood and the contorted legs of daddy long legs, and then I turned around and saw it. THE MASSACRE.

There, bleeding out on the windowsill like a smashed grape, was the ladybird I'd just savagely destroyed. It was practically broken in half - it's innards pooling about it, sticky like a candy gone bad in the sun.

I felt pretty shitty about that, in itself.

I grabbed a napkin, and stared at my parents - they hadn't witnessed the tragedy - I checked the rest of the cafe - they hadn't witnessed it either, I was safe.

I wiped the death from my elbow.

I sat shifting about uncomfortably. I waited for my parents to suddenly become aware of the situation, to get manic, angry, sickened.

YOU KILLED SOMETHING!! They'd say - YOU KILLED A LIVING THING!! WE DON'T WANT YOU ANYMORE. Stay here in Blackpool when we leave. You're no daughter of ours.

But they hadn't noticed.

Thing was, I'd killed loads of ants and spiders in my time, but this was different. Ladybirds weren't evil. Killing one was like taking a hammer to the sun.

I turned back around, and noticed at the other end of the windowsill which stretched out past about five other tables, two other ladybirds approaching, practically holding hands.

One was tiny - a baby, the other was around the same size as the one I'd just killed, and it was obvious to my child brain that it was the mother. They quickened pace when they saw the murder scene behind me.

The mother approached the corpse whilst the baby, obviously in a large amount of trauma stared frozen at who was probably the ladybird baby's papa.

The mother was crawling all over the corpse, frantically. Then the baby joined and both of them looked as though they were screaming, standing on their hind legs and thrashing about.

I wanted to apologise. I wanted to scream, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!, but they wouldn't have cared. No-one cares that anything's an accident, you only care that something bad has happened and it can't be undone.

Then they picked up what was left of the corpse and carried it away with them. I shit you not. They left a couple of legs behind, and part of what I guess was a piece of ladybird skull.

I stared at my parents. They smiled at me. I imagined what would happen if something bigger than us just clumsily whammed it's elbow down on my father in the same way. He'd be gone. And we'd need to carry his body out. As much of it as we could find anyway. And then I wouldn't have a dad.

I started to panic. The World seemed so unsafe, suddenly. Anything was possible.

I burst into tears, my parents came over to comfort me, console me, they couldn't get any explanation out of me apart from deep, sorrowful gasps which resembled vowels and sharp letters.

We went to the Pleasure Beach fairground that same day and went on the ride with the swings that fly out in a circle. We got engulfed by ladybirds - hundreds of them, everywhere. They got in our ears, up our noses, down our t-shirts, they got caught in our hair, and eyelashes.

They knew who I was, I thought, and they were getting their revenge.

Life Lesson 2: Everything is a dirty stinking lie.

2010-06-14T00:04:00.010+01:00

Suffice to say, I've always been under the impression that a period is a happy, high fiving, gory salute to the fact that there is categorically, under no possible circumstances a baby inside you.

A total lack of fanny-weepage, on the other hand, was a threatening commiserating signal that slut karma had decided it's big pay off moment was this, and took the opportunity to knock you the fuck up.

Turns out that all of this is one big, awful, stinking lie. All of it.

I heard a horror story about a year ago from a close friend of mine who described how her boyfriend had become extra paranoid about sex.

He'd just returned from visiting friends - two of which, a couple - we're now suddenly in possession of a little newborn baby.

He didn't even know she was pregnant, he said. But as it turned out, neither did they.

For nine months she got her period. For nine months she showed no other symptoms of breeding - no stomach, no weight gain, no mad cravings, no morning sickness. Nada, nothing, zilch.

She just woke up one morning, felt ill, experienced the worst stomach pain of her life, and popped out a kid. Just like that.

Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror.

A close pal of mine, Pearl, has somehow managed to recently become a doctor.

We got totally fucked up the other night and I told him about this story - he's a doctor of vaginas, or whatever you call it - and asked him if any of it was at all plausible. I begged him to tell me it was all bullshit. An urban myth. He shook his head.

Happens more often than you think. All of it's plausible.

ALL OF IT???!

All of it. You could be pregnant right now.

I gasped. Threw a hand over my mouth. I felt vomit lurch up through my throat.

Why would you say such a thing...??

Sorry.

It is true though. Had a woman in just the other month. She was athletic - had a stomach like Jet from Gladiators.

Oh, I loved Jet.

Oh my God, I know, right? Killer. Anyway - she comes in complaining of extreme stomach pains. We all shit ourselves thinking it's appendicitis - this bitch is going to die, right? WRONG. I get a finger up there...

He gestures his two finger vag-wiggle technique at me, making a face like he's trawling through sewage.

...and that's when I feel the baby's head.

NOOO....

Oh yeah - she gives birth to a baby girl. Nine months of bleeding - worthless.

Shit.

I feel swathes of paranoia wash over me. I, like most women, get paranoid about pregnancy whether or not I've even had sex that month - and now this?? Fuck.

The next day I browse the pregnancy tests in Boots. They all cost over £8, which is nearly a quarter of my weekly budget. I decide I'm going to shoplift one. Maybe two - just to make sure.

But then I notice that all of them are security tagged up to high fucking hell. I try Superdrug - the same. I try St Johns market - SHOCKINGLY the same, even though security tags probably cost more than the walls in that place.

I've no solution to this, other than to live in abject fear for the rest of my still fertile life. Thanks a bunch, womb.

Lady Things

2010-05-31T22:05:00.003+01:00

The Hangover

2010-05-31T22:02:00.001+01:00

Three day binge. Inexplicable unplanned binges, cross-firing into each other.

It’s morning now, somewhere in deep, silent vaults pertained in my skull is a bunch of brain cells licking each other back awake, and cursing my fucking name. They’re all mush now. Hollow. They’re skins without substance.

Coffee, I think, coffee will fix everything. Come on fellas, stop punishing me.

Sitting then in a greasy spoon, staring directly through the steamy vapors cradling my limp, greying face and into the black cavern of optimism, of comfort, of muddy caffeine.

Somewhere near the counter a woman can be heard abusing the waitress for not putting any cream on her mocha.

We don’t have cream, the waitress tells her.

The woman turns on her heels, swears, and then turns back as though nothing has happened.

She asks for a white coffee instead, Can you manage that? She spits at the poor, scrawny underpaid cow behind the counter.

She walks past my table. I cower.

It’s 11am and she’s wearing stack heels so large they resemble murder weapons for the feet. Her hair is bright purple and short. She’s also wearing a cut off denim jacket which she probably bought ready-cut and grungey looking. She probably paid a lot of money to look so fucking awful.

I suddenly catch a whiff of myself - three day hedonism. A stench potent with shameful things, burnt things, mysterious things, unclean things, chemical things, lusty things, sleepless things. I can’t judge anyone.

I sip at my coffee and watch a pigeon trying to eat a bee on the pavement outside.

The purple woman returns to the counter.

Wheres me coffee, love?

It coming. Being made now - two minute, sorry promise.

Oh is it now? Bloody ordered that before anyone else in ‘ere.

She starts pointing around the place - Before him, before her, before this one ‘ere - she throws a finger at me. I have a minor stroke and feel a flush of sweat engulf me.

It coming miss. Two minutes.

I NEED it now, girl. Do understand that? I fucking need it, NOW. I’m not leaving this counter until you fucking pass it to me.

Fine. You wait.

The scrawny foreign waitress escapes to the back and rants something in an indecipherable fast paced language. She brings out two full English breakfasts and walks past the silly cow stood at the counter.

Eh, love. Are they our breakfasts? She storms over to the table the waitress has just slammed the plates down on. Make sure you bring that fucking coffee over, she says sternly shoving her face so close to the waitress’ that their noses nuzzle for a second.

The coffee comes over.

The purple things friend is kicking off now. She’s from Yorkshire and her voice sounds thick with the experience of a woman who’s probably broken more than her share of teeth, jaws and noses in her time.

She’s wearing a maxi-dress which she probably bought from the market, but will proclaim it’s designer to anyone who dares fucking ask.

The Yorkshire one is unsatisfied with her breakfast. Fuck knows what she was expecting, but apparently the beans are touching too much sausage, the sausages ‘look funny’, the bacon looks too fatty and it has a fried egg rather than two poached eggs as requested.

She walks up to the counter. She’s also wearing big heels but in the disguise of a gigantic wedge which bellows her arse out like a prize ass (the animal, not the body part).

The service ‘ere, love, let me tell yer - she puts her hand on her hip - the service ‘ere is fucking disgusting. Yer food is bloody disgusting. And you are a poor, poor, excuse for a bloody wage, aren’t yer? Listen love, tell yer chef behind there, yeah, to fucking just throw an egg on - a decent bloody egg - he can even scramble it if his fookin GNVQ cookery class hasn’t covered poachin’ yet.

Two minutes, she scowls, any longer than that and you’re gonna have a bloody problem.

She marches back to her purple state of a mate, and the two of them discuss how incredibly, soul destroying and offensive the greasy spoon they chose to eat in has turned out to be. They change the subject to talking about Sex And The City and how it taught them ‘a lot about love an’thaaa’ when they were young girls.

My coffee’s running low. I watch them out of the corner of my eye stuffing sausage, bacon and toast into their mouths in massive mouthfuls and hope to God one of them gets it lodged in their throat - if just for a minute.

I contemplate gagging them with my own putrid, stinking socks but think better of it. It would mean having to walk home with my feet rubbing inside my shoes, and today will be hard enough as it is.

Their eggs haven’t turned up. They’re furious.

My phone keeps going. Text messages pile up and crash together the way traffic jams do when a rogue car slams into the back of it. Apologies. Pleas. Begging. Seduction attempts. invitations to suspicious parties. Frightening anecdotes. I feel bile rise. Flashbacks hit me.

The purple thing and her donkey mate throw their napkins onto their half full plates. They take a sip of their coffee each and both look at each other with dramatic disdain. They charge once more at the counter and with juvenile, disturbing synchronization hurl a shit storm of abuse back at the waitress.

They grab their faux-designer bags and totter out the place. I think I remember an episode of Sex And The City when Carrie Bradshaw did the exact same when leaving a greasy spoon, but then realise it was actual an episode of Street Crime Uk involving a jewish trannie called Minnie who wasn’t served kosher meat.

Fuck.

The waitress starts sobbing.

I grab a few napkins out of the table dispenser and run to her aid, dabbing her face and apologizing on behalf of half-cut, badly dressed northern women every where.

They’re so rude, I say, grinning shit at her.

And then just as planned she smiles at me, says her thanks, and makes me a free coffee.

She squirts cream on the top of it.

We had it the whole time, she says, I just didn’t want to give it to them whores.

Life Lesson 1: Everything Is Shit

2010-04-30T17:11:00.001+01:00

Some way or another, it all begins at around 9 years old. It only takes a minor incident, a slight slip of innocence, an adjustment of the current World order as you’d previously known it, for you to realise how utterly shit everything actually is.

For me it was Brownies. For the most part - or the first year at least - Brownies was great guns. The once weekly meeting ground was an opportunity to do little else than play games, eat your body weight in free biscuits and sew badges onto a sash for everyday heroic ‘achievements’ like waving at the crazy auld woman who lives down the road from you, or sharing your lunch with the poor kid in your class who stinks like she’s slept in her own piss and turns up to school everyday with stale cornflakes stuck in her hair.

HEROIC.

We were a pretty tight little unit for a while there. There was about 30 of us in the group and being pre-pubescent weren’t yet the utterly pyschotic bitches we’d turn into in just a few years time. No-one fought. No-one picked on nobody. Everyone hung out, high fived, ate their body weight in biscuits.

There was a set roster of games. The best one was Lions And Tigers in which all the girls formed two parallel rows and sat facing each other with their feet together - each pair of girls had their own animal name and during the course of a convincingly improvised story would have to leap over the legs of the other brownie scouts in a race to see who could run around the rows first and sit back down.

It was brutal. There was always someone who would ‘accidentally’ stick their leg up at you mid-sprint. There was always a girl sobbing by the end of it with a skinned knee. Nearly always a mysterious stain of blood on the floor from where someone lost a tooth or got a nose bleed.

We learnt a lot about the brutality of the jungle from that game.

It eventually got banned.

In it’s place a new game was created. The rules of which are still hazy and tortuous to me, even now.

They involved sitting in a circle. Brown Owl - a sweet middle aged lady who was in charge of the whole team - wore a cape, and using a long stick would tap and draw imaginary symbols and shapes on the floor in front of her, walk around the perimeter of the circle tapping certain girls heads repeatedly before spanking her own hands.

This went on for a good couple of weeks before a single person even got an inkling of what the hell the game was about, and then out of nowhere my then best friend Evans yelped out STRAWBERRY! You’re spelling out STRAWBERRY!!

Everyone turned and gawped at her. The moment hung still and astonished.

Then everyone turned back to brown owl and gawped at her instead.

She was untying her cape. She motioned to my best friend to join her outside the church hall for a second and when they returned, Evans was now wearing the cape. She was now holding the stick. She became the most powerful person in the whole universe at that moment.

She sat down. She drew circles and tapped the floor in front of her. She walked around the perimeter of the circle and tapped certain girls on the head. She spanked her own palms.

No-one knew what the hell she was doing. No-one guessed for another fortnight.

Then thick as pig shit Claire Maloney bellowed CAT!! YOU’RE SPELLING OUT CAT! I GET IT!!

Then Brown Owl, Evans and thick as pig shit Claire Maloney all stood outside the church hall, and when they returned thick as pig shit Claire Maloney was wearing the cape, and holding the stick, and grinning smug as an idiot who’s just recited the two times table up to ten.

She sat her dumb arse down. Drew circles and tapped the floor in front of her. She walked around the perimeter of the circle and tapped certain girls on the head. She spanked her own palms.

Afterwards, with our free disposable cup of orange squash and pockets full of hob knobs, I broached the subject with Evans.

Tell me how it’s done, Evans.

No. I promised Brown Owl I wouldn’t tell anyone.

Please! Come on, I’m your best friend. I won’t tell anyone.

It’s not about that.

What’s it about?

Loyalty.

Lo-what?

Loyalty. Brown Owl says I’ll get a badge for loyalty if I don’t tell anyone.

You can have my badge, if you like.

You have a badge for loyalty?

No. I’ve got one for sharing my lunch with stinky, cornflake hair Cate though.

That’s not the same.

Oh. What about if I give you my share of biscuits.

No! I’m not sharing. I FIGURED OUT HOW TO PLAY THE GAME, SO SHOULD YOU! ITS EASY!

By then she’d reached her house, had started to cry, and slammed the door at me.

I took the next week off Brownies. Evans was giving me the silent treatment and the thought of spending one more week being too stupid to figure out a stupid game made me want to slap myself in the face whilst simultaneously vomiting. I was a brutal kid.

When I’d returned the next week, half the group was in on it. Apparently the week before a tonne of the girls had somehow figured out the shady inner workings of the game. They’d all donned the cape. They’d all shook the stick.

There was 12 of us left now. The nightmarish suggestion that we might be singled out by our stupidity, abandoned by it, rejected for it - the suggestion that one of us may never figure this out, may never be part of THEM - hung devilishly over our heads.

This was the first threat of failure. This is what they teach you in Brownies.

The group, becoming segregated in the two packs of those who had guessed the method of the game and those that hadn’t, became more and more blatant. Those that hadn’t spent their time nervously sweating and watching, with longing, the girls whose brains had not decided to abandon them. Those that had, high fived and patted backs. Wecome To The Club!

Brown Owl stood with that group. She didn’t stand with ours.

One by one our group grew smaller and smaller. I begged Evans with growing desperation to tell me what the rules were, what it all meant. I bartered with biscuits, chocolates, clothes, cd’s, tapes, toys. I grabbed onto her jacket as she walked away. I sobbed.

People don’t need all your material shit. They don’t need to be begged. The more you beg and plead, the more you prove that you need something from them. To have something that people need and can’t have is the most valuable thing in the whole fucking World. What an age to learn it.

I asked one of the most recent joiners of the other group to share her secret with me.

There was a pact! I screeched, distressed, We all made a pact to remember the group you’d left! To tell us how to play the game. PLEASE TELL US!

No.

No?

No.

Why?

Promised Brown O--

I don’t care if you promised her.

That’s not very nice.

I know. Well - tell me how you worked it out.

I didn’t.

You didn’t?

No. Brown Owl told me.

BROWN OWL TOLD YOU?!!

Yeah.

Thanks.

It was all so clear to me now. Brown Owl. This was all a mass conspiracy! This was all a way to torture and bully! It was all so elaborate! The whole game was probably fake!

EUREKA! That’s it! The game isn’t real!

Evans was tapping out something onto the floor.

CLOUDS!! I shrieked YOU’RE SPELLING OUT CLOUDS!!

There were only three of us left now who hadn’t worn the cape or tapped the stick. It was time to break out.

The other group looked at other. Thick as pig shit Claire Maloney started laughing.

Brown Owl shook her head.

I’m afraid it isn’t. Everyone - what word are we spelling out?

CHOCOLATE - everyone chanted, smugly.

Why? Why is it?! How?

That’s something you need to work out.

Me? It’s impossible. This is a stupid game. Stupid.

I stood up and walked to sit over on the stage at the front of the church hall. I heard some of the girls laugh at me. They wanted me to cry, but I would not cry.

Oh well, why don’t we carry on playing anyway, shall we girls?

The girls all cheered. I could hear the stick tapping. I could feel them watching me.

Another one of the final girls shouted out FLOWER?! She got it correct. Then there was only me and another girl left.

My cheekbones hurt. My eyes felt strained. My head hurt.

SUNSHINE? said the final girl. Everyone applauded. I was alone.

Can you tell me how to play the game, now? I asked. Defeated. Done.

They ignored me.

Everyone got biscuits. Disposable cups full of squash.

The next week Lions And Tigers got put back on the playtime roster and I totally killed on the nose bleed and skinned knee front.

SPRING TIME 1

2010-04-24T17:46:00.002+01:00

Ballad Of The Serial Cranker

2010-04-24T17:45:00.005+01:00

Collapse

having sprinted

having traced

the course

your fingers

counseled

spritely fervent

digging

ticklish

rising gasp

tugging at stale breaths

collated

a week ago today

they

cum

out my eyes

hoo

who

gallops 'cross my tongue

your name

my fingers aren’t the same.

Ambitions

2010-04-24T17:40:00.001+01:00

I began

a princess

a mutant turtle

a rock star

a rescued

a moonwalking

Jurassic

musing

typist

a ballet

football

boy

introvert

everyone else

a sporty spice

a ginger spice

a thin

big chested

adoration

a bed bound

sexy

solitude

a painless

slut

subversive

an irresistible

irreverent

reciprocated

single

a disposable

dead

drunk

a lesbian

straight

a long-term

sober

virginal

chaste

an untouchable

alone

golden

a success

faulty

frisbee

a not me

LastFMHaiku

2010-04-24T17:31:00.003+01:00

see his lastfm

playlists, hearing the songs

he takes to his bed

we make love in my

head and we fuck with our

palms over our mouths

music like imprint

his songs scar and fever

tuneless fossils of

something we never

had. I am drum solo

pounding skin on skin.

Interview with Is Tropical

2010-03-29T19:37:00.005+01:00

PHOTOS BY SAKURA: http://www.rockphotographer.net

It’s 7.30 on a Friday night, and Liverpool’s Korova club is bustling the exact way you’d expect it to be following the end of the mainstream horror that is the nine to five working week.

Those familiar with Korova will understand that the thought of trying to find a band amongst a club this notorious as being a must-drink spot for band types, encourages paranoid suggestions that the next half hour could well be spent glaring incessantly at well dressed, cool looking people in the hope that they’re the band I’m here to interview.

But then, amongst a table littered with vanquished noodle boxes and busy laptops, sit Is Tropical. It’s fair to say that they stand out. Not that they’re dressed in an attention seeking ensemble that screams, ‘we’re in a band, yah’ - although they are wearing some beautiful looking leather jackets which we covet from the offset - it’s more their presence and demeanor. They have the sort of intriguing and attractive personalties that you notice from far across the room - warm and inviting, you can’t help but just want to high five them instantly.

Is Tropical - a name which bassist / vocalist Dominic suggests originates from a scouse friend of theirs who constantly used the phrase ‘is right’ - are a delectable onslaught of catchy, spontaneous, synth pulsating slacker pop. Their songs are pep-laden dreams bound for Summer time status as the tunes to blast at sunshine piss ups in the park.

They’re currently at the beginning of a grilling tour schedule - tonight they’re playing one of their final shows as part of a tour supporting New Young Pony Club, but from here they’ve also got non-stop dates booked supporting Good Shoes, followed by a further tour with The Big Pink.

Shit guys.

“Yeah...” groans synth maestro Simon, grinning ear to ear “it didn’t really plan out did it?”

“I’m sure we’ll get to the end of next month and just be like ‘Aah shit’”, adds Dominic, laughing.

Oh, piss flaps. But at least you fellas have a strategy of tour-time survival, right?

“Well, I think we’re learning that you can’t get absolutely wasted every night, otherwise illness comes on” quips Simon, sensibly. All eyes dart immediately on their poorly looking drummer Gary, who sounds close to coughing up an entire lung any time soon and punctuates the entire interview with exhausting sounding chest rattlers. Poor little lamb.

Simon continues, “We’re trying to plan it so we can stay with people that we know, and it kind of works a little bit. It’s always good to tweet. Tweet - and look out for lonely people. I think because there’s so many of us (on this tour) we can be a bit imposing to just stay in someones house. Half stay in the van one night and the rest stay in a house. It can actually be pretty good fun to stay in the van, it can be a bit uncomfortable but at least you can have a bit of a party. They’re usually the best nights - they’re the ones you remember.”

Onstage, Is Tropical have a visually captivating stage presence courtesy of some gnarly looking Bandit scarves tied around the lower halves of their face. I admit to being fiercely disappointed that they didn’t wear the scarves for the interview - bandit fetishism has officially found it’s peculiar, vulgar place in the heart of this lady, right here. So what’s happening with the bandit masks?

Dominic: We wear them just for the stage really - they help to separate us from the audience. We’re not like Daft Punk or whatever and just wear em all the time.

Simon : It’s weird because when you’re playing an in-store gig, like when we go back to London, it’ll go from us being in the store and drinking to suddenly having to put the masks on and then go onstage. I guess it’d work better if we got to play bigger places and then we could just appear and play a gig and then disappear.

Like a Stars In Your Eyes style smoke screened transformation?

They laugh, and nod in united agreement - “Yeah, just like that!”

Simon: I still think it works, I mean it was never done to just hide ourselves from any audience or to try and be horrendously mysterious, it was just something to make us look more interesting during the performance. It also means that you don’t wind up doing the sort of awful pouting band photos that a lot of bands do.

Gary: Plus it hides you dribbling on stage.

You like to dribble on stage?!

Gary: Yes. Yes I do. Every now and then.

Fair play.

Simon: First we made masks for the eyes - like bird masks and that, but just found them to be too impractical.

Gary: Yeah, they ruin your depth perception.

Simon: Yeah, you can’t see your guitar or your synth properly with a mask like that, but I think it’s important to have something which sets you aside visually from everyone else. It’s like when you see a band in a magazine and they resemble characters - it makes you wanna delve in a little bit more and find out more about them.

Dominic: It’s not even wanting to find out more about them - it’s recognizing that there’s a difference between the performer and the actual person.

Simon: True - it’s just interesting to, not put on a persona as such, but to create a different atmosphere. There’s also a lot of people who don’t do it visually but characteristically who when you meet them aren’t boisterous and are quite quiet but then when they get on stage they just change. They don’t need a mask or anything like that they just do it with their personalities and start going nuts and it really works.

Is Tropical began band life in the less than tropical and now notorious London squatter party scene, becoming renowned for putting on their own gigs - specifically in the now defunct Toilet Factory.

D.I.Y gigs are currently very hot shit indeed, with most major cities’ (Hello Leeds! Hello Bristol! Hello fair Liverpool!) turning their backs on the overpriced, poor sound quality of their local club based gig nights in favour of the cheapo, BYOB gig within a house party.

Simon: We wanted to create our own scene and not latch onto anyone else’s. When you’re wanting to play it’s just easier to put on your own gigs, especially when you get thrown on at half 7 in a shitty pub with a promoter who doesn’t do his job, you may as well just put your own on.

Any advice you care to impart with people considering throwing a gig in their house?

Simon: Make sure anything that can catch fire is wet.

Dominic: In a very sad way, thats probably one of the most vital ones.

Simon: Also, there’s like 40ft drops that we’d make sure to put mattresses at the bottom of - that’s an important one. And be prepared to find some weird stuff - like at one of our parties there was this turd in the very corner of the room. It was boxed off, and at no moment during that party could anyone have been left alone to have done it. There was always about a hundred people in that area.

What about when things get predictably way out of control?

Simon: Police have come into our parties before and just gone ‘alright, can you just try and keep it down?’ We’ll show them round to prove that nothing bad’s going on, and that it’s all above board, even though it’s probably not. So long as you’re not selling alcohol or anything like that -

Dominic : - Yeah, so long as you’re not making money it’s fine. It’s quite horrible sometimes, it can get to about half ten and there’s already hundreds of people there. We’d need to get our czech / polish housemates to sort out the riff-raff and then the police would turn up...

Simon: One time some big drug dealers turned up and wouldn’t leave, so one of our crazy housemates just started stripping off all his clothes and started to do a wank in front of them. They just ran out the building, they we’re like ‘this is just too fucking weird!’ and got out as fast as they could.

So you’re recommending that Purple Revolvers’ readership wank at party undesirables?

They laugh, shaking their heads apologetically, each mumbling their own version of ‘Yeah...suppose so’.

Oh Christ. We can already imagine a lot of ill-equipped, light weight indie boys turning up to A&E at 3.30 on a Sunday morning with the genital equivalent of a knee-capping following the publishing of this advice.

And with that frankly disturbing mental image stained boldly into our poor, long suffering brains, we give them a quick smooch and a hug goodbye and scamper impudently away wishing they’d become Bleached Hem's new BFF’s.

Sigh.

Listen to Is Tropical, look at some pretty pictures, buy merch and check out their full tour schedule on their Myspace page at: http://www.myspace.com/istropical

Evol Presents: New Young Pony Club @ Korova *w/ Is Tropical and Teeth.

2010-03-28T21:20:00.005+01:00

PHOTOS BY SAKURA: http://www.rockphotographer.net

Let’s set the scene a little. It’s approximately 28 hours until the clocks go forward to officially fly the fine beginnings of British Summer Time - whatever that entails, probably one day of absolute sun, followed by dozens of desperate attempts to spark a BBQ under a succession of light showers - and the past ten day forecast has been grey skies on grey bloody skies.

Yuck.

There’s ways to replicate the hot, delicious atmospherics of the Summer though, amongst all the remanding coat-still-on gloom. If you like the idea of waking up with skin more orange and leathery than a St Johns market knock-off handbag, you can always wile your hours away on the sunbeds. Alternatively, a bass heavy, electro pop, thunder raucous of a band night can also do the trick. Sweat drenched, dance related humidity and all.

Luckily the couple of hundred of finely dressed, radiant young men and women cramped into Liverpool’s Korova have opted for the latter tonight. And they’re in for an absolute, ridiculously high-charged treat that half makes you wish you’d worn some kind of beach wear instead of the usual Korova uniformed cardigan and / or leather.

Second support act Teeth - with apologies to first support act, the amazing Hallo...I Love You! who Purple Revolver sadly, sadly missed to grab some rat-nasty dinner - help to kick things off with amazing fucking aplomb. Front woman Veronica, a hoody-caped storm of she-howling irrepressible energy, conducts the set with a Bikini Kill style gusto of charisma, snarls and at times sweetly near-monotonous vocals. Drum skins get pounded to oblivion and a laptop bearing third member bobs around beside her, arse shimmying, grinning deliriously and button pushing rhythmic, pulsating electro melodies at the audience.

Veronica even bravely attempts a circle pit in the middle of the set but only manages to peruade the members of third support act Is Tropical, stood at the side of the stage, to bravely step in and run wildly about with her. The song ends and a terrified looking audience stare jaws agape at this bombastic youth who surveys the edge of the crowd, ‘Remember dong Geometry in school?’ she laughs, ‘this is just like - look!’ - she drags her hand around the edge of the semi-circular gaping void she’s just created - ‘a perfect fucking circle!’

Circle pit fear-defiers Is Tropical take to the stage next. Managing to accomplish some outstanding on stage visuals thanks to some very dark mood lighting, back projection of tropical scenes and faces hidden by fantastic looking bandit scarfs, their set is a pep dominant, synth-infested, lyrical slacker-pop fest.

Particular set highlights Seasick Mutiny and When O’ When are prime examples of the smile inducing casanova indie charms Is Tropical have to offer. Seasick Mutiny - a synth-convulsed, cheerful swagger of a tune belts on menacing and bass-jovially divine, whereas When O’ When provides mind defacing catchy hooks, and doss Parisian waltzing which bursts into a fervent, hustling pulsation of anthemic addictiveness.

It’s no surprise that following a rare succession of such awesome support acts as this, that the audience are riled up and crowd crushingly anticipative for New Young Pony Club.

Christ alive, they’ve barely played even half a song and the audience are bustling wildly amongst each other, it’s packed so deep and so eager for the trip in here that you literally can’t move without grinding up against some absolute total stranger.

Front woman Tabitha is dominant, stunning, raw - a one woman chemistry set of fiery, snaking movements, intent on making sultry, humble eye contact with every appreciative person in the audience.

Their set tonight is perfect. Songs off Fantastic Playroom sound re-worked and fresh - their sound at times even resembles the bass bleating, more tropical sounding of Bow Wow Wow’s back catalogue (not least of all because of Tabitha’s new hair stylings closely resembling that of Bow Wow Wow’s front woman Annabella Lwin). This is most evident on Hiding On The Staircase, in which the more exotic elements of the songs original structure are drawn out and exaggerated into a dance-o-matic, bass heavy dream. The chorus and hooks are given a bigger role and embellished into infectious, repetitious statements.

New single Chaos, too, is another prime example of NYPC prowess for performance. Loud and powerful - melody and chorus sound brighter and bigger, and with an intimate pronouncement of personality blasting proudly and uncontrollably through.

The crowd is a sweaty, make up smeared mass dance off by this point. Tabitha pauses breathlessly between songs to thank the audience again and again, and to taunt them into a further fevered excitable glory.

‘I just want to say how amazing it is that so many girls have come to the gig tonight...’ she says at one point, looking genuinely delighted by the fact - and rightfully so, it’s still incredibly rare to attend a gig in which more than half the audience are bloody female.

A cover of PJ Harvey’s deconstructive gender role classic Dress is a nice addition to the set, and non-surprisingly one which the audience laps up. Impassioned and with NYPC’s style still imprinted all over it - the songs delivery is forceful and defiant, but never loses touch with the bands five man mission of dance induing excellence.

The set finishes in a pit of sweaty, over-exerted exhaustion. The crowd are red faced and wilting and Tabitha is panting away on the floor of the stage with a towel over her face. Heres hoping that this Summer is even half as hot or as spring-heeled as tonights unintentional replication of it has been. We might have to all quit our day jobs and resign ourselves to sun soaked, dance ridden leisure for a couple of months if it is. Perfect.

New Young Pony Club official: http://newyoungponyclub.com/

Download NYPC's new album The Optimist here: http://bit.ly/crA70B

Teeth Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/teethdance

Is Tropical Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/istropical

Evol on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8926329069&ref=ts

Important Life Lessons (from 90's music videos) - Part 3

2010-03-26T16:10:00.003Z

You’ve Got It (The Right Stuff) is really quite the sweet ‘bros before hoes’ morality tale on the surface. But if you’re willing to really dig deeper, and Gods knows Bleached Hem has gotten good at digging holes for itself lately (Re: Cycle Sluts From Hell), then you’ll realise a far darker ill-morality tale with many a murky, unwanted lesson to be gained from it.

Let’s begin with the whole bros before hoes issue. I mean, it’s that age old shitter of meeting the pal of your dreams, sharing a few scandalously magical months joined at the hip and playing old Mega Drive games round at theirs 5 nights a week, and then BAM! Motherfucker meets a new ‘special friend’ and before you know it you’re relegated to the once a month meet up slot once reserved for their poor, suffering mother.

See, that’s the great thing about New Kids. Here they are, singing this song about things going pretty damn smooth with their new respective lady friends, but - hold up son - they’re still finding the sweet time to rock it with their boy chums.

Look at them - goofing off, joyriding in supposedly stolen cars and spending the rest of their free time co-ordinating heavily choreographed in sync dance routines with each other. Damn. That’s what bromance is all about - being totally in sync with each other. To hell with that totally rad young lady. They’ll call her back when they’re done singing at each other, Godammit. Bitch can wait.

But then, look a bit closer and the whole thing starts resembling a pop video rendition of Larry Clarks epic aids ridden, teenage sex-terror film Kids (http://tinyurl.com/cwx7dk). Especially when they start pursuing that poor outnumbered trio of local underage girls and chase them into a bloody cemetery. I mean, come on New Kids - we know we’ve probably got bras older and with more sexual experience than you guys but still - that isn’t how you win a girls heart or even legally get into her knickers. In fact you’ve taken the whole bros before hoes principle to a totally dangerous new level.

The lessons we can take from this are so incredibly important that we’re gonna have to break it on down for y’all - New Kids style. Uh-oh-oh-woah-OH-OH!

One: Gentlemen. Bros before hoes = yes. Just don’t let the friendship enter Chasing Amy ‘I think we all need to sleep together’ territory. Especially in cemeteries. And especially with underage girls. And super especially if they look terrified out of their poor naive wits. Poor lambs. Get a grip fellas. You can take one night off a week from the lads to woo, romance and tap that ‘right stuff’ without turning it into an ill-fated group hang. We all know how they end, and so do the Police.

Two: Ladies. If your beau isn’t answering the phone and is turning up to your dates with his whole baby faced posse of jive limbed loser friends - get some self respect and ditch the chump. If you continue to see him, it’ll only end with you becoming a beer caddy during Friday night X-Box live playoffs, and you getting drunk and copping off with that freaky looking one in the hat in lieu of actual affection from your genuine boyfriend. And that is science fact. NASA did research.

Three: Stay outta the cemeteries, for Chrissakes.

Four: Shredded jeans and Bauhaus t-shirts make you look totally badass. Irrespective of age, badass achievements, and the fact that you’ve blatantly got no fucking clue who Bauhaus are, you ignorant pissing poser.
This, again, was also researched by NASA.

Five: We totally thought New Kids On The Block were dreamboats when we were five. But then, that’s exactly the kind of shit which boys like New Kids want you to think. In retrospect, they’re horrific, disturbing, sinister and haven’t got half a brain cell or even a quarter of good intentions between them. So err....what am I saying again? Oh yeah. Don’t have crushes on anyone. Ever. They only let you down. Yeah. Something like that.

Don't Mess With Cycle Sluts...

2010-03-19T00:26:00.008Z

Fuck. I always have to go and punch above my weight.

CUE WONDER YEARS STYLE VOICE OVER: Having posted the vital life lessons to be favourably learnt from the amazing Cycle Sluts From Hell up on Purple Revolver, I've discovered some of my own vital life lessons from having been a grammatically incorrect smart-arse with awful taste in men.

1. Don't mess with bikers.

2. America HATES me.

3. Even bands with one hit to their name from the 90's still google their old band daily for news, so don't fucking start mouthing off. They will kill you.

4. Gotta hand it to them, they make some good points. Good game Cycle Sluts. Well played. And for the record, most the time I wish I were a beer too.

I doubt these comments are the end of it. If you happen to notice a leather bound bunch of dames wearing a pair of tits for ear muffs around NYC any time soon, you'll know what became of me.

Important Life Lessons (from 90's music videos) - Part 2

2010-03-19T00:23:00.001Z

PART 2:

CYCLE SLUTS FROM HELL

I wish You Were A Beer

Fuck, we’ve all been there. The precious shrapnel the dole considerately threw on the floor for you just 2 days ago has already perished mysteriously from your wallet, you’re stuck in some hipster club at 3am and there aint nothing left for another goddamn bevvie.

And then what’s this?! That fucking tattooed, plaid on plaid, latfh.com reject you’ve been giving the glad eye to all night in the hope of obtaining one last charity ale, has decided to fucking bolt it? Now!?

Hey, fuggedaboudit!

What Cycle Sluts From Hell fail to realise is that they’re not really doin themselves many favours in the ‘hey, buy me a drink, lover’ department. Sure, leather crotch-hoisting catsuits might go rad with that badass, chain gang look you’re going for, but at the end of the day most of the poser boys you’re singing to are big time adorable sissies at heart and TERRIFIED of sexually aggressive madams such as yourselves.

Also, it might help if you weren’t stood directly in front of the bloody dance floor smoke machine all night. You may as well rub vaseline on a camera lens, take a self-portrait and upload it onto a dating profile on Hipsters-need-loving-too.com. No-ones gonna want to approach such a visually ambiguous so-and-so at that time in the morning, lest they wake up next to Kerry Katona on a comedown.

Plus, you know what ladies, there’s nothing wrong with being nice. The whole passive-aggressive foreplay thing died out sometime swiftly after Fatal Attraction happened. It’s okay to be attracted to posers - for the most part they can be pretty fucking hot. You know, if ironic mustache’s and boys in bands are your bag, like, so jog on from your aggression and stop telling the poor bastard to shut up - I doubt the poor bloke’s even had a chance to get a word in yet, the way you’ve all been goin on.

But we totally get it. There’s been many an arduous, embittered gathering of early morning ill-advised flirtations when we’ve mistakenly locked lips with a bloke in a Folk Implosion t-shirt and an upturned ‘Suicidal’ trucker cap when really all we need is one more bloody beer, and we’ve just not paid enough attention to our actual bloody needs. You know, like those times when you gorge on 3 bars worth of Dairy Milk when what you actually need is a large glass of water. Or is that just us? Anyway, the point is, we’ve been there sisters, we’ve been had, we’ve been done, we’ve been used and abandoned in our hours of need too! But you don’t bloody well see us going round in a leather studded bathing suit and head banging our mullet perms about the place in protest.

So what can we learn from Cycle Sluts From Hell? If you aint got even a half decent face, no-one’s gonna bloody well waste time trying to look at it - in fact video directors will probably persuade you that dark lighting and heavily shadowed visages are what all the bands are doing these days, posers have feelings too and Christ alive, don’t overdo it on the make-up. We can’t tell if you’re a Cycle Slut or that evil red-hooded gnome from Don’t Look Now. Sinister. Even Marilyn Manson has his boundaries, and they stop well before yours. And you know it’s a dark Cycle Slut day in Hell when you’re taking lessons off Marilyn soft-lad Manson.

Fuggedaboudit.

Bleached Hem does a Voodou

2010-03-16T20:40:00.011Z

Bleached Hem decided to get some totally out of character beauty therapy done by those rad visual makeover genius' at Liverpools' Voodou salon on Bold Street. With shocking and frankly disturbingly self revealing results....

This is way out - way, way, way, WAY out - of my comfort zone.

For starters, I’m probably hairier than some of the men in this place. I like to use feminist credentials to back this up, but really it’s because I’m a lazy little rat and at the moment am trying my damnedest to repulse and repel people.

Have you ever had your nails done before? The nice lady prepping the extensive nail buffing, shaving, clipping, shining, and plastic apparel asks.

No, I reply, trying my best to think up an adequate reasoning as to why a woman of 24 has never gotten round to fixing up her paws. But I’ve got nothing but the poverty card - Too skint, I say, smiling half-heartedly.

And what about a facial? She continues, whilst buffing the shine off my natural, flava-less claws.

I stare at a patch of fag-stain yellow on my index finger. I am vile. Please - buff it off. NOW.

No, never had a facial either. To be honest I’ve never even been a hairdressers before.

She pauses with incredulity, as anyone should do - it’s a fucking achievement to have survived this long in life without paying someone to sort your mane out.

Me mums a hairdresser - I just always got her to do it.

She nods with a slight look of the impressed on her face. But it could just be gas.

I mumble something extra about how there’s no money in writing and how hard it is to survive on nada, but trail off when I realise that I sound like a grade-A prick.

So, we’ve got you signed up for a Brazilian wax for today too. I’m guessing it’s your first time for that as well is it?

Yessum, I gulp.

I’ve avoided this procedure for years. Kind of because I never wanted to wind up in a situation when I was sleeping with a man who actually preferred me resembling a pre-pubescent in my downstairs smut factory, but also because I never wanted to seem like I was trying too hard.

Being a little natural in that area bears the same kind of casual nonchalance that turning up on a date in a dirty auld t-shirt dress and some torn tights does. Couldn’t give a shit, lad. Take it or leave it.

So do you know what a Brazilian involves then? she asks, raising her eyebrows in delight.

Err...not really.

Well, it basically means you have absolutely no hair on your labia or the surrounding area - we leave a small strip, but that’s it.

The labia! Christ! It’s only 11 in the morning and already I’ve wound up in a situation when the grooming of my sodding labia comes into the conversation.

It’s all good though. Some 45 minutes worth of having someone preen and buff all the crap off your nails and replace then with synthetic loveliness is more therapeutic than I’d at first have envisioned. In fact, I’m pretty fucking zen right about now.

And then I’ve got talons. This is how Catwoman must feel! I think, victoriously undermining the glamour aspect of the moment with a momentary blurb of geek-culture that my mouth thankfully refuses to say out loud.

I feel pretty fucking ghetto, actually, with talons. Part of me wants to ask her to get some press on crystals out and spell out ‘THUG 4 LIFE’ above the cuticles. Or get some leopard print stickers over the top. But I successfully curb the idea. It starts with ‘THUG 4 LIFE’ - it ends with getting your weave torn out at a freestyle hip hop night for calling someone a ‘sistaa’, and failing to reference a Lil’Kim lyric in retaliation.

We then move on to the facial. For some reason this means me having to take my top off, which sounds like the kind of cheap rouse boys use to see yer tits - ‘come round and hang out if you want - but you’ll have to take your top off if you do. The central heatings gone haywire again’...err, sure. But it’s actually all part of a supremo rad plan to make me feel FUCKING BOSS.

It’s less a facial and more an elaborate attack on every yucky, ugly detriment life has decided to shit on you over the past few weeks. Shoulder, neck, chin, cheeks, nose, forehead, ears - all massaged. Goodbye mean bitch at the dole! Farewell bank charge for spending over my overdraft! See yer later guilt, loathing, envy and failure! Good riddance rubbish boys! Adios feel-better drink binges! It’s so unbelievably good, I almost ask her to marry me.

She gives me a skincare check-up - turns out living on a diet of extreme-caffeine dependence, carefree alcoholism, coco pops and Drum Gold rollies does diabolical things to the skin. Congestion. Extreme Dehydration. Breakouts. It is a litany of the fact that I am probably going to age haggard and sallow. Like that dude from Motley Crue with that spinal disease and bloated liver who pretty much has to play guitar out of a wheelchair these days, with a face like Grandpa from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Fuck.

She lights some incense and candles and turns out the light. This is more romance than I’m certainly ever used to. Perhaps it’s all a clever plan to help me take my knickers off for the Brazilian later.

And then I’m left for a sweet, solitary 20 minutes with some kind of heavy, delicious face mask on. I can hear the Voodou Spotify playlist upstairs banging out some high-five worthy contemporary pop classics, and begin to wonder what would happen if that creature from Cloverfield suddenly attacked Liverpool.

Holy fucking crap.

And I’d be down here with a towel covering my tits and lord knows what on my face. What if I had to run?! What if those beastly little creatures who make people explode in that movie like the taste of face masks?! What then? What THEN??!

What the Christ? Where does this crap from? Relax. You. Freak.

And then I nearly doze off, awakened only by the light being switched on and the mask being scrubbed off my face.

I don’t want to be waxed now. The idea of flashing my wanny at someone whilst they strip hot wax covered hair off sensitive areas is the last thing my newly discovered sense of enlightenment needs. I’m zen, man! Don’t ruin my buzz!

But it happens. I walk into a different room and am left to de-robe my bottom half and replace my underwear with a rather fetching disposable thong type thing and lie down on the bench.

There’s a lot more teamwork involved than I’d initially thought (teamwork is dreamwork, guys!), mostly involving pulling my skin tight to avoid ‘bruising’ (don’t bruise my labia, for Chrissake!) whilst the beauty therapist administers the wax and yanks, pulls, and tears hair from my poor little body. I feel like I’ve betrayed the poor thing! I begin to worry that it might go on an orgasm strike in revenge. Please. God. No.

It’s not too painful actually. I can think of a lot worse. That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t noises erupting from my mouth which I hope to happy fuck I never hear again. The most vile thing about said noise is it’s ashamedly twee quality - lots of ‘Oooh!’s and ‘Yeeesh’s, at one point I’m sure I even scream ‘Blimey!’, which is a word I wasn’t even aware was in my vocabulary.

If it get’s too painful at any point love, or you just want to take a breather, then just let me know. Oh, and feel free to scream and swear to your hearts content - they can’t hear you upstairs.

In Voodou no-one can hear you scream.

Usually such a statement would mean an embraced free reign of noise. Every filthy word I could think of parading out of my mouth thick and fast and at decibels requiring health warnings. But I barely even muster a ‘MOTHERFUCKAAAAA!!!’ - instead it comes out all shocked and whimpered, like ‘mumfugger’. I’m polite. POLITE.

There is much laughter, obviously. I probably cussed more during the massage than I am now. I am an epic failure of bad-ass proportions. Whatever you do Ms. Voodou - just don’t tell the kids - it’d break their hearts to think their hero wasn’t the potty mouthed, discordant nightmare she makes out to be.

And then it’s over. Relieved, and frankly embarrassed, I start to sit up.

Oh no - not yet. If you just turn over, I’ll do your bottom.

EXCUSE ME?? You’ll do my WHAT?!!

There’s bits of hair that we couldn’t reach from the front, She smiles, It won’t take long and it wont hurt.

A wave of shame passes over me. I can’t even discuss this part of the day - I made a mental note the second there was arse to hand contact to erase it from my mind forever.

And that’s that. Harmless, really. Well, I mean - I feel a little violated. But in a good way. And what’s more I do feel like a million, trillion, dirty bucks. My face looks pure - PURE! I look the most sober and healthy that I probably ever have after the age of 14.

And also - the pussy-do looks good, man. Not nearly as sleazy or low-rent pornographic as the radical feminists had me believing. In fact, I dare say it's tasteful.

And like a wise old drunk used to always say to me, right before she got dementia - Sweetheart, how can they pick you flowers, if you don't trim the lawn? She was so right, that one. SO right. This one's for you, Ethel.

So yeah. big time high fives to you, Voodou. I’m frankly shocked that my face, nails and fanny didn’t destroy the equipment you used on it...but Christ, it survived and so did I. Let’s be pals, shall we? Yeah? Rad. See you next time buddykins. xoxo

Music Video Reviewwww: Lady Gaga: Telephone feat. Beyonce

2010-03-12T23:52:00.002Z

Following some less than complementary statements made against Lady Gaga during our interview with Siobhan Fahey, mostly concerning the grave, awful possible truth that Gaga is essentially a fantastically presented version of a terrifically turgid song, it seems apt that Telephone (Feat. Beyonce) could well be an immense example of this fact.

But don’t believe the hip anti-hype.

I mean, Paparazzi was pretty awesome (mostly because we like all the support we can get, musical or otherwise, for stalking the objects of our affections) and Lovegame too was a filthy little treat (anything you can crotch-grab along to is A-Okay in our books)...oh, who are we kidding, maybe she is bloody awful but this is true love. Unconditional. Gaga could cover a turd in shoulder pads, mickey mouse sunglasses and record it passing through a sewer for 4 minutes, and we’d still find a guilty pleasured way to dance to the end mix.

Telephone, in that respect, is quite the deliciously polished turd. In fact, it’s such a deliciously polished turd that it’s practically gourmet. They’d probably sell it in Harrods with a price tag only Mohamed Al Fayed himself could afford.

The song is essentially an elongated drunken text message set to one helluva conflated post-mix of fabulous aural tack. It’s also totally irrelevant. The song could be preaching the genocide of kittens, and we still would have attentively watched the video 5 times in a row.

Christ - the cigarette wrap around shades? Diet-coke can curlers? Police tape lingerie? I mean, it’s a cartoonish exaggeration of a Sunday morning down at Liverpool 1, sure, but I sure as fuck don’t look forward to wearing any normal clothes ever again after seeing that fine array of beautiful absurdity.

Richard Branson too must be bloody glad-happy that his mobile phones are allowed to be smuggled imperviously into prisons these days, eh? I mean once inmates the Western hemisphere over check out the kip of that LG being practically stink-fingered out of Gagas crotch, they’ll all bloody want one! Nice work Branson. I can see why you’re so rich.

But have you even listened to the song, Dickie? Bitch can’t get no signal! Doesn’t sound like your phones are providing the service they should be. But even if she could get above a one bar, she certainly wouldn’t fucking answer you - you lout - she’s too busaay cabbage-patching to Xanadu or Loose Joints or Christ knows what else by now. Unlucky.

In short: Pussy Wagon - we love you. Tarantino pastiche - we love you. Psycho jittering editing - you’re unecessary, but we love you. Gaga vagina shot - we applaud you. Death by honey? Sandwich making?! Tank Girl style cartoonery!!? Meer cat dance routines?!! The costumes! The dialogue! The make-up! Oh my!

Perhaps the prison guards sum it up best when, having copped a flash of Gaga’s Vay-gaga, they say:

“See, I told you she didn’t have a dick...”

“Too bad...”

Too bad indeed. We’d be all over that shit if she did.

Gaga. Beyonce. We salute you.

Important Life Lessons (from 90's music videos) - Part 1

2010-03-12T23:36:00.010Z

DJ JAZZY JEFF AND THE FRESH PRINCE -

GIRLS AINT NOTHIN BUT TROUBLE

Not to get the spanners out and re-open an old and under-utilized rumour mill, but well, anyone else remember those Will Smith gay rumours? Scientology...sham marriage...Hollywood rent boys...all that onscreen Fresh Prince Of Bel Air chemistry with Carleton?! Boy oh boy.

Girls Aint Nothin But Trouble, in retrospect, provides a whole lotta bubble to that squeak.

I mean, for starters, Fresh - you always were close with yo’homeboy Jazz, aint nothing wrong with that, but when you release a song publicly attempting to start a heterosexual coup against the female race through rhymes with said homeboy, you gotta start to worry.

For starters, this ‘Exotic Elaine’ you speak of - any broad with an alliterative double barrel name featuring a precursor adjective of a slightly saucy nature, is not one to be trusted. Particularly when homegirl looks of the same genetic ilk as RuPaul, dresses like a streetwalker and wears a weave that Marie Antoinette would have deemed overkill.

And Fresh, everyone knows, if you’re paying a ho to hang out with you she’s basically into casual prostitution, and if you’re flashing the dollar about then it’s within a mutual consensus that you want some smart price loving, and she wants to buy a tuna steak for her dinner tomorrow night. So whats all this about you freaking out when bitch finally starts getting aptly ‘fresh’ with you?

“She started grabbin all over me, kissin’ and huggin’ - So I shoved her away, I said, ‘You better stop buggin’”

Wait - what? Seriously - FRESH - let’s get real here. This is your argument as to why straight men everywhere should ‘remember (your) rhyme and get the hell away’ from girls? Christ. If you don’t want a slot machine to pay out, then don’t ply it with your pennies - IDIOT. And as for her/he screaming ‘rape’ on you at the end of the whole thing, well, that kind of a story might hold up in the patriarchal fun house of the law courts, but it sure don’t fly within the rhymes of a pop video. No. Sir.

Another lesson we can learn from Girls Aint Nothin But Trouble, is that one should never trust a broad who interrupts a crucial Mike (who??) Tyson fight / casual tequila binge to drag you back to her demonic, satin sheeted, Backdraft homage of a bedroom for no good dirty deeds (girl, you cookin a BBQ in the bathroom, or what? Crack open a window fo’Chrissake).

In the very unlikely scenario that a fine honey hunts you down at one of your more pitiful, lonely, drunken moments and offers you no-strings sex on tap, it’s probably only because she’s got her no-good hulk of a beau due home at any second, and she’s lookin for either A) a lameo, dreadful threeway B) an extra hand to get E4 to work on freeview or C) to get grave biblical vengeance on said beau for that RuPaul looking weave she found in the backseat of her Toyota last night.

Either way, you don’t want in. Just look at the Fresh Prince! Look at him! Outside in the snow in his goddamn knickers.

Should you find yourself in a similar situation, we highly recommend taking the cowards way out a la Fresh Prince. No-body likes a hero. Just look at R-Kelly - hiding in a closet with a baretta hoping to either shoot, stealthily hide or opera your way out of a scenario does nothing but escalate the situation.

Although, admittedly, hiding in a closet does work wonders for some situations huh Fresh?

Whatever, anyway - the main lessons to be learnt from Girl’s Aint Nothin’ But Trouble? Wearing La Cox Sportif for a date will encourage your girl to hide inside her house for three hours till you go-the-fuck-away (and don’t stand on the step and wait for her - even TV licensing officers have more self-respect than that).

Do decorate your bedroom walls with crudely painted pictures of Betty Boop, Felix the Cat, and the lyrics to your latest rhyme. It’s totally rad and will NEVER look dated.

And finally, don’t over-compensate for a hidden homosexual agenda. The fine honeys hate it.

Interview with Siobhan Fahey

2010-03-04T11:12:00.002Z

Most of you will remember, fondly and with a skipped heartbeat of adoration, Siobhan Fahey as the incredible glam-goth figure from Shakespear’s Sister’s video for their big hitter of a single ‘Stay’.

Visually arresting with a vaudevillian array of dark make-up paired with a sparkling dominatrix catsuit, crown of glittering thorns and facial expressions spanning the sinister and the seductive, Fahey was a subversive breath of fresh hair in a stale industry of uninspired pop music. The song too was pretty fucking amazing. We played it till the vinyl was practically transparent.

Calling from Los Angeles over a particularly sketchy Skype-line, we’re discussing the transition Fahey made between the mainstream, bubblegum pop stardom of Bananarama to the slightly subversive pop artist she became with Shakespear’s Sister. Does she think mainstream pop is starting to finally experiment again with previously underground genres and darker themes?

“I do think there’s signs of that again” she begins, her tone thoughtful and her voice beautifully sultry, “I mean, God - pop music’s become a dirty word because of Pop Idol and manufactured pop taking over the chart and the radio in the past ten years. It’s been quite horrific really, so it’s refreshing to see people come along who look more interesting and sound more authentic, writing their own stuff.”

“Whenever the World gets too marketed, and too money obsessed and too status obsessed, then you get a reaction to that, I think. People are sick of manufactured rubbish now - the recession’s a great leveler. Art always gets more interesting in a recession”.

Anyone in particular that she thinks is pushing those boundaries?

“There’s no-one really that I find particularly amazing, to be honest with you. The closest thing I’ve come to being intrigued is La Roux.” She pauses, “And obviously Lady Gaga looks amazing, but her music’s appalling. It sounds like Hazell Dean! WAKE UP WORLD!” she declares emphatically, sniggering, “It’s style over content, she’s got an amazing voice but so do a lot of people down the pub, you know?”

Yowza. For some reason we imagined Fahey as intrigued as the rest of us by Gaga’s sexually aggressive stage performances and unrelenting visual style. But now our eyes are open - maybe Gaga really does just sound like ‘Eurotrash from the late 80’s’, as Fahey gigglingly puts it. Maybe we have been suckered in by style - again. Bollocks.

Fahey herself is an incredibly stylish lady. You can always count on those with punk rock ethics to spearhead an incredible sense of individuality with artful, expressive fashion choices, and to hell with what everyone else is wearing.

“Being an old punk, I believe in your right to look like an individual and express yourself in the way you look. I don’t spend a fortune on clothes - I’m not into the whole idea of wearing labels...” she pauses before laughing warmly at herself, “Although I do make the exception for Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen! Right now I’ve got this really fantastic McQueen suit with amazing space-age shoulder pads on a very narrow cut, like early Roxy Music, jacket with drainpipe pants”.

Colour. Us. Jealous. Understatement? Completely. In fact, it’s been scientifically proven that 1 in 3 people with immaculate taste turn to total dreamy jelly whenever they hear the words ‘McQueen’, ‘Space-age’, ‘Shoulder pads’, ‘Roxy music’, and ‘drainpipe pants’ in the same sentence.

What is abundantly clear is that Fahey - who at 53 years old is at an age which our horrifically ageist society condemns as being too far past 30 to do, well, anything really, particularly if you’re a woman - is still undeniably punk rock. Any woman who can use a music festival as an excuse for a family vacation, deserves a belter of a high five as far as we’re concerned.

Her and her two sons (from her marriage to the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart) have been to the Coachella music festival in LA together for the past four years, in fact: “My highlight of last years festival, which was really an amazing life moment that I actually cherished, was that I saw Leonard Cohen”, she gasps with adulation, “Oh, it was incredible! It was like being in a church when he sang Hallelujah - the whole audience swayed, and held each other and cried - it was amazing. Probably one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen in my life actually”.

Not only that, but rumour has it Fahey has also done magic mushrooms with her sons (it’s okay, they’re 18 and 21 before you start dialing social services). True story?

She laughs, “It was their friends that gave it to me behind their back! And of course, double standards apply - I mean they were outraged that their mother had taken their friends magic mushrooms”.

Which brings us to talking about London in the 80’s. An overspill of excess from the 70’s punk scene combined with an overkill of grandeur from the decades optimism of ‘new money’ meant that drugs were rife, self-destruction was common, and there was plenty of opportunity to fuck up on hedonism.

“I kind of remember the late 70‘s, early 80’s much more strongly than I remember the mid or late 80’s because they were really quite pivotal times in the culture. I was very young and it was a magical time, but my memory of it - maybe I was hanging out with the right people, or maybe the wrong people - but we weren’t doing drugs. Or at least not the drugs that people later got addicted to, you know, cos they were too expensive!”

“I guess what happened was that in the mid 80’s, everyone that I knew in the early 80’s who had been really inspiring had fallen foul of heroin. I don’t know quite what happened there. I guess it started off with ecstasy...but yeah, I saw a lot of people nose dive. I don’t know why - didn’t they read the double page spreads in The News Of The World when they were growing up? I did! And it warned me off! When you’re 10 you salivate over seedy lifestyles.”

Does she pay much attention to the tabloids these days?

“Not any more. I totally cut the tabloids out of my life because it depresses the hell outta’ me that people are that unscrupulous.”

I tell her about the disturbing trend of tabloid journalisms’ morbid fascination with watching female artists and tabloid stars self destruct - almost putting a timer on the sensitive, over-worked and over-exposed minds and bodies of the successful, talented and the famous and waiting for the cynical, money grabbing, messy pay off.

“Well, I don’t buy the tabloids and I don’t read the tabloids, so it’s news to me that they like to watch female stars unravel. Obviously, Amy Winehouse and her drama was a kind of a national obsession for a few years, and I think that was probably because she’s so brilliant that it’s horrible to see such brilliance go to waste. It’s like McQueen dying - it’s a terrible loss to the culture - it’s our own personal loss, you know?”

Fahey could have wound up as another ‘troubled female star’ herself, especially if the culture would have been as fame-baiting and papp-aggresive as it is now. In 1993 she faced her own battle with a severe depression and admitted herself into a psychiatric unit.

“It was useful to me at that particular junction in my life,” she expounds, openly, “it’s just an opportunity to get off the merry go round and be able to take stock of things. There was a good friend of mine who followed me into the clinic two weeks after I got admitted so I spent the whole time nursing her!” she laughs.

“I’m not really somebody who thinks that therapy is necessarily the answer to your problems. I’m somebody who’s always been able to identify and talk about my problems to my friends and the people around me anyway. It’s probably much more useful to people who aren’t able to do that. I find salvation in taking a more spiritual overview to life and when you can do that, it totally alters your perspective”.

We decide to get away from such a heavy topic of conversation much to Fahey’s delight, “It’s only nine in the morning here!” she shrieks, amused, whilst we apologise and take ratio of the probably uneven and unfair caffeine keel between us, and move on to talking about her music.

Shakespear’s Sister’s most recent album Song’s From A Red Room (the red room in question being Fahey’s actual bedroom, a “fantasy bedroom, with red silk damask walls, like a womb or a sanctuary”), is a delightfully dark pop-synth hidden gem pitched somewhere between the sublimely sinister and the acutely seductive.

Bitter Pill from Song’s From A Red Room was partially covered by the Pussycat Dolls, who turned it into a bizarre amateur mash-up with Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff taking place of Fahey’s original chorus. How the Christ did that happen?

“In a totally fortuitous and random way,” she declares, the words audibly clambering fiendish out of the corners of her no doubt tickled grin, “a friend of mine manages the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, and I’d given him a couple of tracks of mine to listen to and he was going into Interscope to have a meeting about them.”

“Interscope we’re putting together the Pussycat Dolls project and they were looking for songs, he played them Bitter Pill and the A&R man loved it and they got in touch and asked if they could use it. So I sent them the files, and they replaced my vocals with theirs.”

“It’s a totally different track though. My chorus, which is ‘Bitter pill to swallow, can’t see tomorrow...drowning in sorrow’!” she laughs, “Oh! I think that’s a bit too dark for the Pussycat Dolls, so they didn’t use my chorus, they supplanted it with Donna Summer. So it’s kind of a travesty - a musical travesty - in my view. But hey, financially it paid for me to actually record Song’s From A Red Room”.

Shakespear’s sister are touring the country from April 15th, what can we look forward to from her live show?

“Well, I’m really, really happy to be playing live again with the band. The last time I did a Shakespear’s Sister gig was, I think 1997, although I was doing some little underground performances in electro clubs a few years ago, but it was really pared down, so it’s great to be playing with a full rock’n’roll band with four fantastic album worths of songs to draw from”.

As to what else to expect from the live show, Fahey’s keeping pretty schtum, except to mention that she’s going to look damned amazing:

“Well, I’ve got a pretty cool costume, that I designed myself. I’ve got a beautiful headdress which is VERY important, since I’m playing very small places and people can probably only see my face. So I’ve gotta have a good head”.

We seriously can’t wait.

Shakespear's Sister will be touring the UK at the following dates and venues:

Thu 15th April 2010: O2 Academy, Sheffield

Fri 16th April 2010: O2 Academy, Liverpool

Sat 17th April 2010: O2 ABC, Glasgow

Sun 18th April 2010: O2 Academy, Newcastle

Tue 20th April 2010: O2 Academy, Bristol

Wed 21st April 2010: O2 Academy, Birmingham

Thu 22nd April: London Bloomsbury Ballroom

You can buy tickets here: http://www.ticketline.co.uk/shakespears-sister-tickets or from the usual ticket peddlers.

Shakespear's Sister official: http://www.shakespearssister.co.uk/

Buy Song's From A Red Room here: http://tinyurl.com/yf4lxvl

Albummm Revuuue: Sweet Apple: Love & Desperation

2010-03-03T09:40:00.001Z

Oh dear. We’re not sure how we feel about the cover art to Sweet Apple’s Love & Desperation - we get it’s referencing of Roxy Music’s Country Life, but seriously? The whole thing screams of cheapness and that poor brunette looks more than a little malnourished. We might even have to start rubbing a Sayers cheese pasty on her sleeve notes in the hope that we might achieve some voodoo act of getting meat on her bones from afar.

Oh well.

Anyway, the album, which could probably be renamed ‘When I Get Sad, I Get Rad’, see’s John Petkovic working through a multitude of personal tragedies and anguish with fellow Cobra Verde bandmate Tim Parnin, and Dinosaur Jr.’s Jay Mascis.

Conceived from an aimless and dejected cross country drive following the death of Petkovic’s mother, Love & Desperation bears all the classic hallmarks of anthemic motor rock collections. The kind of stuff that spirited middle aged men everywhere blast out of their pride and joy on four wheels on hot summer days. It’s an engine chugger alright, but it’s a little easy listening. A little arena rock. A little half arsed and little else.

It’s strong points lie in it’s emotional density, and it’s ability to take a particularly heavy lyric and offset it against an upbeat and resolute riff of defiance.

For the most part though, it doesn’t stand out in a crowd. It has the potential to be amazing - but instead it sounds somewhat half finished, with a guitar sound that at times resembles something that you might have heard on a copy of Wayne’s World for the Megadrive.

There are a couple of diamonds in the rough. Kind of. Hold Me, I’m Dying is pretty fucking catchy, and contains the instantly relatable lyric, ‘we’re dying/ So let’s fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck till we die’, and Dead Moon has a dreamy cadence to it which is refreshing amongst all the chug-chuggery of the more cock rock elements of the album.

But then songs like Do You Remember and Flying Up A Mountain sound a bit like Jack White has thrown all the songwriting scraps from his own supergroup projects and left Sweet Apple scrabbling about for them, furiously trying to construct something worth high fiving over later. The end result is stagnant and uninspiring, covering well tread - if not distinctly OVER-tread - ground, and is unfortunately forgettable.

In short, Love & Desperation is so sadly disappointing that I might have to do a cry, wipe my tears away with my Dinosaur Jr. tee and scream ‘MASSSCIIIISSS, NO!’ at the top of my lungs in a psychotic bundle of upset in an unmoving car somewhere.

Heartbreaking. Truly.

Love & Desperation is released on April 19th.

Sweet Apple on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/sweetapplesongs

Live review: Japandroids @ Korova w/ Apple Cannon, Cold Ones, and We Come Out Like Tigers, 27.02.10

2010-03-01T17:06:00.003Z

Oh, Apple Cannon. Let it be known that the lingering lethargy from Friday night boozing, and the onslaught of groggy head that attacks following the ill-advised late afternoon pints are blasted the fuck out of the evening by your storm of deliciously loud skin peeling thunder rock.

The red and green clad duo (drummer and guitarist, both sharing bombastic throaty vocal duties - what more do bands need these days?) are like a mental hygiene program, providing a sonic boom of Kyuss-esque brain cleansing doom.

From the palatably basic but feverishly fine riff-attacks of ‘Oh YEAH’ to the divinely catchy stoner-metal of ‘Lightning Mask’, it’s suffice to say that we’re well awake. Wide eyed. Buzzing. Jittering. Over-stimulated. This must be how Lindsay Lohan feels at 4am on a Wednesday morning.

Get the bevvs in lad! I’m good to go! I’m all over it!

Cold Ones too, don’t disappoint. The sound quality’s a bit iffy, to say the least with frontman Russell, high-voltage loud and energetic as he might be, not able to contend with the sheer noise of his bandmates performance. In fact it’s doubtful his microphone’s even on at some points. But fuck it, it’s hard to give a shit when a band can grant an after-song applause made up of high-fives all round like CO could.

High energy old-school hardcore punk. We never thought we’d see the like ever play in Korova - used to be that the hardcore scene were shuffled away to play gigs out of wheelie bins and death trap basements on the outskirts of the city centre, like the Oscar The Grouch of the music scene. We’ve come a long way, you guys.

Frontman Russell, donning a kamikaze bandana and laughing out between song banter that is at times delectably cringe-worthy, is an uproarious, blur of refreshing psychosis. The entirety of the stage area, including the totally unstable ceiling, all become his own private play pen. In a brave salute to Ian MacKaye, he threads the microphone through the rafters of the ceiling before hanging off it by his knees and continuing the lyrical howlings’ that command your complete attention at all times.

It’s nerve racking stuff, that. We once saw a fly stumble onto one of those rafters only to bring half the fucking ceiling down. Luckily, the CO frontman dives off unscathed. Whew. CO are everything you could want from hardcore punk. Loud, fast, pummeling, raw. They’re unyielding and fun - that’s right FUN. I can’t remember the last time that adjective was applied to the local music scene, but there you go. True Story, yo.

We Came Out Like Tigers are less so. In fact they’re a bit of a downer. We suddenly feel like Lindsay Lohan at 7am on a Wednesday morning when all the nose sugar has left the blood, and you’re left wondering what the fuck happened to your life, lovers, career and evening. Boo-fucking-hooooo!

Make no mistake, they’re an alright band - at least technically - but they just don’t seem to work within the context of the gig. Their arrival onstage, particularly having followed Apple Cannon and Cold Ones, is kinda like walking straight from a party at it’s peak to a interview with the Dole, wherein you’re somehow serendipitously stuck sitting between two of your ex-lovers who winge at you for a whole half hour before being berated by pen pushers for being a total fucking sponge.

Nightmare.

The inclusion of a violin adds a nice level of melancholic, insistent drama to their set, and their opening song does have a tidy piece of spoken word in it, which is incredibly interesting, but a great many of their songs also tend to blur into the last one.

But then Japandroids take to the stage. And sweet child of mine, they are exactly the dreamy, scuzzy, riff-sultry heart grabbers that the hype machine warned us they’d be. Maybe even better than that.

‘Hi, I’m Brian, that’s David’ smiles guitarist / vocalist Brian pointing excitedly at his drummer, ‘we’re Japandroids from British Columbia Canada, and this is the last night of our European tour, so let’s get fucking wild’.

And wild they get. Feral, to be accurate. Kicking into The Boys Are Leaving Town - a catchy, upbeat number which builds up from it’s repetitive and gorgeously simplistic verses into it’s intensely epic chorus of ‘Will we find our way back home?’!.

The drums throughout the set are blindingly AMAZING. They punch through the flesh, the mind, the heart - they make the cans of Red Stripe in the hands of audience members foam up with vibrancy. Both of them are translucent in their energy - sparkling. Lithe limbed and discordantly sexy. You can’t take your eyes off them for a second.

Lo-fi anthemic, their minimalist brand of college rock is too infectious for words. Rockers East Vancouver, is performed with a rawness and exuberance that long outdoes it’s original recording, declaring lyrics loud and with a visceral permanence that’ll secure it’s place in the mind for days later. Wet Hair too, with it’s repeated lyrics of ‘She had wet hair/ say what you will/ I don’t care/ couldn’t resist it’, is just so insanely catchy and uproarious, that it’s impossible not to grin wide and beaming along to it. And sweet Christ, that drum roll at the end of the song nearly brings on a coronary. Sublime.

The audience is going ape-shit too. There’s at least more than a dozen people scattered around the place screaming hungrily along with every word - even along with the more obscure songs from the bands’ collection of older material.

The set is sadly blighted by a few technical difficulties. But as proved early on in the evening by Cold Ones, it really doesn’t much matter about tech issues so long as the set is attacked with vigour and exultance.

Except they do stop to fix it up.

They stop and stop and stop.The break seems to last a lifetime. Just when they seem to have it together, something else happens and the tech guy returns nervously tinkering with buttons while Dave sips water cooly on the drums and stares grinning at the audience, totally amused.

‘This is just like those buddy movies, you know, where like the cop is one day away from retirement and he suddenly get’s killed - this is kinda like the musical equivalent.’ he laughs.

Brian tries a thrum of a guitar riff. Something’s still fucking up. Dave continues, ‘We were so close! So close!’

But they get it together in the end, Lethal Weapon style, and storm the fuck on.

I Quit Girls, provides a melancholic change in tone and pace that is blissful, and more than a little spine chilling. All goose-pimpled downbeat, with their trademark lyrical repetition that wrings each word out dry, and cutting, but never drops it’s energy. ‘She was just one of those girls...After her, I quit girls’. Ouch.

The set seems to last an age. At times it becomes a trance like repetition of the tranquil, anti-tranquil, sublime and the rad. And yet it still seems to end too soon. You feel like screaming at the top of your lungs, Can We Keep Em?! Oh, Please! I Promise To Take Good Care Of Em! at the promoters. But instead they leave. Back to British Columbia Canada, and the audience looks so stoked from the experience that they may never sleep again. Lohan style.

Japandroids Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/japandroids

Japandroids official site: http://japandroids.com/

Apple Cannon Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/deathbyappleseed

Cold Ones Official Site: http://www.coldones.co.uk/

We Came Out Like Tigers Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/wecameoutliketigers

Interview with Dirtblonde

2010-02-24T21:22:00.005Z

The term ‘cool’ has been expressively and adoringly chiseled into the marrow of Dirtblondes’ body of rock’n’bone over the many years of their loud, gnarly, scuzz shattering career.

It’s fixated on every review, winking feverishly at hipsters everywhere with the stamp of approval that Dirtblonde are an official rock’n’roll dream. The real deal. Jagger. Iggy. Leather. Snarling.

So when I ask them about what a typical Dirtblonde day entails, their response is refreshingly uncool by the standards of modern rock’n’roll cliche.

‘A day in the life of Dirtblonde?’ Ivan begins, laughing, ‘would probably be a boring one. For me at least it’d involve listening to jazz and stroking my cat’.

Lula smiles in agreement, she’s wearing a Twilight t-shirt which again is totally anti-cool by the provisos of being in a shit-hot band. To those of us who harbor deeply secret Edward Cullen fantasies, the move is cool-as-fuck. Most of us have to hide our collection of Twilight paraphernalia under the bed next to the porn.

‘There’s nothing worse,’ Ivan elaborates, ‘than people trying too hard to be rock’n’roll all the time. Save rock’n’roll for onstage - you don’t have to be like that all the time. I mean, Iggy Pop plays golf and Mick Jagger’s always been pretty mellow’.

They go on to say how they don’t really listen to the sort of loud music you’d imagine of them at home. Instead they prefer a bit of John Coltrane, Moondog, Dusty Springfield or a spot of Cat Power whilst cooking.

Liverpool’s a weird city. Maybe the epidemic is nationwide, but the trend for creating impenetrable cliques and scenes within the local gig market is one Liverpool finds itself foul to year in, year out. Dirtblonde, it seems, are very much the outsiders in this arrangement. It almost seems that they’re more appreciated outside of their home city, than they are in it.

‘It’s not contrived. I mean, we’re not trying to be outsiders, we just don’t belong to any scene.’ Lula shrugs, ‘I think every city must be like this - it’s pretty competitive’.

‘It’s frustrating’ Ivan continues, ‘I don’t know what it is, maybe because we’re influenced by more American music like Sonic Youth or The Stooges. We’re not really influenced, I don’t think, by the same stuff as the rest of the bands in the city’.

So what do they think of the Liverpool music scene at the moment then?

‘There’s a lot of different scenes around - I mean you’ve got the retro Zanzibar lot, and then you’ve Class A audio, and Pete Bentham’s free rock’n’roll stuff...and then you’ve got a lot of the-’ Ivan winces trying to think of a polite way to proceed, ‘-shitty local bands. Uninspiring.’

Lula adds ‘But there’s a lot of great music in the city. We’re both loving the Anti-pop label - The Dead Class, The Temps, The Fraktures. The Long Finger Bandits are great too, and Pete Bentham And The Dinner Ladies’.

They love, they say, bands with a lot of energy - it’s something they always come back to, a quality which is incredibly evident in their own guttural, brazen-kinesis of a live show. They cite performances by The Dead Weather and My Bloody Valentine as the most notable gigs they’ve been to over the years.

Lula explains, ‘It’s easy to be cynical about The Dead Weather because they’re a supergroup and Alison Mosshart is a bit of a poser or whatever. But they were just so raw and had such a good time - they weren’t trying to prove anything. Alison Mosshart was just so unbridled and getting in everyone’s face. It was so exciting’

Whilst Ivan - a man with possibly the loudest guitar sound Purple Revolver has heard in recent years - thinks back dreamily to the My Bloody Valentine gig

‘It was just how loud it was. You could feel it in your body - the physical nature of the sound! Such energy, again’.

Dirtblonde are a band also notable for their experimentations with mixing spoken word pieces with rock’n’roll. Lula herself had a book of poetry published last year - At 3 o’clock I Think Of Sex And Death - and also co-ran Heartbeats, a rock’n’roll poetry night which has sadly escaped Liverpool’s clutches and moved down to London.

‘It’s always on the cards that I might bring it back on here’, Lula grins, ‘but I never set out to be a poetry promoter. I don’t want to be in charge of starting a poetry group or anything like that. Heartbeats was just fun - we wanted people to develop their performance, and get confidence about their work and move it out of their bedrooms and share it with people. We heard a lot of amazing work at those nights’.

We end with the token Smash Hits hypothetical question. Dirtblonde are at a party. It’s lame as fuck. They’re falling asleep. They open one last beer when Lo And Behold! A bloody genie pops out! He says he’ll grant them the presence of any 5 people of their choosing to arrive at the party and save the night, who do they pick?

Their eyes light up.

‘We have this discussion all the time!’ Ivan beams, laughing.

‘God, we do seriously discuss this all the time, and now that you’ve asked us I can’t think of anyone’, Lula adds grinning and spooling her mind through past ‘dream dinner party’ discussions.

‘Kevin Spacey!’ Ivan shouts out, ‘Oh! And Stephen Fry. And Jeff Goldblum! And Paul Rudd too. We have to have Paul Rudd’.

‘So I guess there’ll be no women, then?’ Lula interjects, laughing.

‘No, no - what about that comedian? Janeane Garofalo? She’d definately be coming to the party’,

‘And the Cheerleading coach from Glee - Jane Lynch. Her too. Definately’.

So what have Dirtblonde got in store for the future?

‘We’re gonna re-record and do a music video for our song Brooklyn. We’re gonna film it in the Laundromat on Aigburth Road’ They smile at each other in excitement. ‘It should be cool. Laundry rock’n’roll...’

Sounds awesome. We’re sure it’s going to be anti-cool, cool as Dirt.

Dirtblonde words: http://dirtblonde.wordpress.com/

Dirtblonde music: http://www.last.fm/music/Dirtblonde

Dirtblonde photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8861519@N03/

At 3 o’clock I Think Of Sex And Death by Lisa Jones (AKA Lula) is available to buy online here:

http://spikepublishing.wordpress.com/buy/ and is also available from Probe Records and News From Nowhere.

live review: Dirtblonde @ Hurdy Gurdy, Badformat, 19.02.10

2010-02-21T12:46:00.004Z

Oh Hurdy Gurdy, file this one in the ‘Lesson Learnt’ drawer and move on. Essentially - if a gig night has taken less than a fortnight to put together, you can pretty much expect it to be a bit of a tits-up, lackluster FAIL.

Hurdy Gurdy at Badformat is tonight reminiscent of those early teenage gig nights that used to go down in Heaven’N’Hell (remember that joint?!) and The Zanzibar absolute beards ago in which the audience was only made up of the bands and their mates. You know, where there’s about five people going ape-shit-with-restraint before some Ramones-rip-off band onstage, and about forty people ambling round the bar high-fiving the bloke they sit next to in sixth-form history for his totally slick guitar skills.

It’s Friday night. Badformat has no phone signal and is as far away from the part of town where all your mates are as is humanly possible in the city centre. This is the gig equivalent of the arctic circle, or a Twilight Zone episode in which apathetic, mean spirited music journo’s are locked in the same gig for eternity until they can learn to just be NICE.

In keeping with this spirit allow us to politely skip through the evenings events, briefly mentioning the total lack of atmosphere and the fact that most people are either huddled round the bar or sitting off on couches around the permitter away from the stage area (unless of course their mates band’s playing), and jump straight to the point where the awesomeness that is Dirtblonde takes to the stage.

Sadly for the cool as fuck, rock’n’noise duo, the performance feels like one of those mid-90’s music videos in which a cool as fuck, rock’n’noise band tear up the stage to a frankly unreponsive, oddly assembled audience (watch Zero by The Smashing Pumpkins or anything from The Dandy Warhols).

Dirtblonde don’t let this stop them though. Having draped the unused drum kit with red LED lights and their mic stands with bright, twinkling scores of bulbs they burst into a sublime racket of gorgeously low register, apathetic vocals and roaring, throaty, louder than apocalypse guitar. Backed only by their trusty drum machine (never underestimate the power of a Boss Dr-670), they’re downright dirt-o-matic, scuzz lusty perfection.

‘This one’s about being an obsessive fan of someone’ Lula announces before they break into Superfan - a riot act of want that sees Ivan dropping to his knees for it’s finale, screeching his fingers across fret boards causing an ungodly, visceral disturbance. He’s bowed upon the floor for the act, as though in begging before a shrine.

There’s a cheeky nod to Patti Smith too, with His Name - a Gloria-esque spoken word, locomotive dreamscape of tersely built up raw pleading rhythm which is sumptuous for Lula’s honeyed delivery and Ivan’s chug-chugging accompaniment.

‘Here’s a slow one for those of you who don’t like too much noise...’ Ivan grumbles into the mic, probably at the scores of lifeless people by the bar shouting over his pneumatic guitar sound, no doubt wishing they were sat in the quiet of The Everyman Bistro eating quiche and discussing the misanthropic merits of silent discos.

They kick into Brooklyn, a plummeting, lost-soul of a song that pines and longs and hammers on with an underscore of melancholy juxtaposed by a determined, swinging fist of a riff that never quite makes the punch, but is opulent in it’s doomsy ongoing threat.

Their finale is as blissfully destructive as they’re notorious for. A Rock’n’fuck-it kick of the bucket that descends from sexy, heavenly moans to a riff-babel infestation of discordant destruction. Lula hangs her head like an unused puppet and bashes bass with an amorous determination for decorum whilst Ivan swings his guitar about the place like Leatherface with his chainsaw, before attacking the LED lights draped around the drum kit. He pulls them off and around him, becoming entangled like Mowgli fighting a neon snake before falling to the floor and writhing about in a onslaught of pure, precious din.

The set is over.
A smattering of half-arsed applause spills out, and a couple of yelps that sound more like the faulty mechanisms of a flare gun than a verbal accolade. It feels like Dirtblonde may as well have been playing in Sayers for all the good it did them, but then that’s Liverpool for you.

But sod it. Dirtblonde - Purple Revolver salutes you. Come round and fuck our office up anytime you want - you’ll probably get more of a crowd, too.

Dirtblonde words: http://dirtblonde.wordpress.com/
Dirtblonde music: http://www.last.fm/music/Dirtblonde
Dirtblonde photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8861519@N03/

Live review: Los Campesinos @ O2 Academy 12.02.10

2010-02-14T02:51:00.006Z

Last time we saw Los Campesinos live, there was a great deal of buzz surrounding their now anthemic boogie-tasm tune You! Me! Dancing! and the audience was made up of Skins-lite teenagers hepped up on Lambrini and White Lightening determined to make us feel older than we needed to and too intimidated to dance.

Within the space of a couple of years, Los Campesinos - and their audience too, it would seem - have matured into quite the collective of intelligent smile pushing indie-pop masters. Gone is the Lambrini and the White Lightening. In it’s place is a band rider full of organic food and herbal tea.

Except there’s been a terrible mix-up - Tinchy Strider is playing the main room at the O2 Academy tonight just downstairs, and him and his ‘crew’ have somehow wound up with the Campesinos rider.

Los Campesinos vocalist Gareth bemoans in a barely decipherable low mumbling drone the fact that a member of Tinchy Striders crew have pissed in his pack of special herbal tea. ‘I like to drink it before I go onstage...you know, cause I’m trying to be like a good vocalist these days and so, yeah, no herbal tea for me’, he winces mockingly like the kid in school who’s had his Kit-Kat chunky had out of his lunch box and is trying hard not to cry about it.

Aaw. And so begins the loveliness that is a Los Campesinos live show - abound with raw teenage angst, some fantastically well written self-deprecating lyrics and walls of irresistible pop-noise that the crowd bops and bounds about to throughout.

The audience is fanatical, singing / screaming along with every song, their fists passionately pounding the air. Their fans believe in Los Campesinos, obsessively, irrevocably, and it’s easy to see why.

When ‘Straight In At 101’ is played, the lyrics are vastly anthemic (‘We need more post-coitus and less post rock’), and it’s impossible not to smile along, particularly when it’s sublimely Philip Larkin-esque ending finally hits, seeing Gareth prosaically pronouncing how his heartache wasn’t featured on the 100 most heart-wrenching break ups of all time over the top of some simple, thrumming guitar. (‘Imagine the great sense of waste/ the indignity/ the embarrassment/ when not a single one of them was mine’). Amazing.

They play a number of songs off latest album Romance Is Boring, and their sound is veering deliciously close to Hefner territory these days, particularly on tracks Who Fell Asleep In and new single Romance Is Boring, in which lyrics are performed with the vocal equivalent of an eye rolling at unachievable love affairs and doomed, lackluster coupledom.

The septet do struggle somewhat with sound quality though (what’s going on with sound engineers lately?) - which sees some of the best lyrics totally drowned out by an inconceivably loud bass. The audience is so plentiful and crammed into the auditorium that you can barely see the stage, and so it isn’t until about 5 songs into the set that you realise Oh Yeah, There’s A Violinist Playing With Them Too, which is a real shame since when the violin can actually be heard it adds a resonating sad face and spiraling intensity to songs.

You! Me! Dancing! of course makes a bat-shit excited appearance towards the end of the set, announcing itself with a teasing foreplay of rattling, scuzzy, noise - the crowd baiting hungrily for it’s blood by clapping uproariously along before breaking out into a mass jive of intensely joyous arse-shaking and limb convulsing when the opening riff finally kicks in.

They end with an endearing amount of humility, thanking the crowd again and again for coming to see them - ‘This is the second best thing we could be doing, and we’re so happy to be able to do it. None of us are any good at football to be doing the first best’, Gareth beams appreciatively before the band slam into Sweet Dreams, Sweet Dreams, seeing the Campesinos frontman jumping straight into the front of the crowd to hive five and love.

An everlasting queue forms at the merch table following the show, with Gareth stood at the side thanking and hugging each individual person for attending, and signing vinyls and cd’s happily. It’s a rare and lovely thing to witness, especially since the fans are so truly grateful to meet him and thank him for a show they’re ear to ear grinning over.

Somewhere downstairs, Tinchy Strider and his mates are probably flinging out piss soaked ginseng and blackcurrent tea bags as souvenirs to the red eyed masses gathering by the stage door to meet him.

Gutted. Luckily for Los Campesinos, the bereft aid of a couple of herbal tea bags did nothing to sully what was a perfect Friday night performance. Piss in all the boxes of tea you want, Strider, but you wont stop Los Campesinos from pissing all over your live show. And that is fucking science FACT.

Los Campesinos Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/loscampesinos

Los Campesinos Lastfm: http://www.last.fm/music/Los%2520Campesinos!?ac=los%20campe

Buy Romance Is Boring: http://tinyurl.com/ygekguo

The Ex & Brass Unbound, Stig Noise MMX and Zun Zun Egui live @ The Kazimier, Liverpool

2010-02-08T22:41:00.002Z

Stig Noise MMX frontman Jacob is pacing about excitedly before yelping out at the already buzzing crowd ‘I can’t remember the last time The Ex played England, nevermind Liverpool’, he grins a wide coat-hanger grin which is mirrored back by the hollering, fervent crowd who’ve hungrily gathered in The Kazimier for the monumental occasion.

The set erupts into the finely tuned discordance for which Stig are consistently celebrated for. A melodic anarchy of brass, throaty lyricism, and killer onslaughts of bass, drum and guitar that never once veer far from perfection.

Each song is decadence - an irresistible array of limb twitching, unpredictable and mediated psychosis punctuated by the occasional spoken word vocal, dual drum finale and sumptuous tentative build ups of pace and noise that explode into a fever of hot tempered noise.

If this is the foreplay, you think to yourself, then fuck-help me when the main flesh scabblers finally arrive to headline later.

Second act, Zun Zun Egui are a little less exciting. Initially, they’re fucking outstanding - an audacious blend of the tropical, the tribal, experimental and downright doomsy. They begin songs down one path and without warning divert, screeching and attentively, down another totally subverting their own sound and the crowds expectations of it. But the formula wears a little thin and samey three songs into the set, and what was fresh and exciting to begin with becomes commonplace and predictable.

The frontman is charming and enthusiastic enough, shimmying, grinding and thrashing himself about the stage and the audience with enough energy to bring on an early Springtime, but his fellow bassist looks more than a little pissed off throughout the entire set, huffing and puffing after each song with the brattish expression of a young boy who missed his afternoon nap and didn’t get a biscuit with his glass of milk that evening.

But still, their sound is exactly what the audience is craving - the beats are heavy and the bustling bodies are busting out spazz-o-matic moves sponsered by Give A Shit How Stupid This Looks, I Gotsta Dance!

And then ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod - an entire ETERNITY passes before The Ex & Brass Unbound take to the stage, tune up, plug in and begin what is without a doubt one of the best live shows The Kazimier, and even possibly Liverpool, has ever witnessed.

That’s no exaggeration either. It’s so good that the vocabulary hasn’t been invented yet with which to do a review of them justice.

Featuring a line up of eight members (including 5 on brass), the post-punk no-wave legends are remarkable from the get-go. A flawless and dissonantly brooding performance off-set with shimmers of the jaunty and the relentlessly jazzy. Sweet Christ is it good. The vibe in the entire theatre is electric - the room awash with uncontrollable sweeping movement and spacious unbelieving smiles that will leave faces aching for hours afterwards.

Songs span intricately and incessantly, managing to explore songs within songs - the whole band looks ecstatic, and when you consider that this is a band that’s been around for about 30 years now, is a comforting and heart-warming thing to witness.

Their set develops an extensive range of genres, all played with a forcefulness that makes you bite your lip with such rapture that you might require stitches afterwards. Songs begin on triumphant, opulent levels and descend into a cacophony of debauched, poetic spewed noise.

A version of Hungarian folksong Hidegen Fujnak A Szelek is a perfect example of all this - seeing drummer Katherina Bornefeld take to the vocals, cow bell in hand, and create a sublime din of re-worked, idiosyncratic genius. A song which is by equal turns jubilant and disquiet at once.

Onstage camaraderie is big, the band beam at each other and are playful with the performance, hitting drum machine sampler buttons with guitar heads in sync, taking the piss out of the member of the brass band who dares climb up onto the above stage stage of the Kazimier to belt out a plunger muffled power bleat and at the some of the dancing going on in the crowd before them.

The band thankfully return for two encores - the highly desperate ear splitting screaming that follows their absenting of the stage leaves them with little choice - of unpredictable dance heavy joy. They end with a brass off which sees two of the brass band trying to tunefully outdo each other before crumbling into a myriad of onstage giggles.

Awesome - awesome - awesome. There just aren’t the words or the online space available to fully credit the gig with the praise it needs.

Put it this way, if you missed this gig you’re an absolute bloody fool. Simple as.

Once A Month

2010-01-27T23:51:00.001Z

Like super sized

like club

sandwich

double layered

self

four eyes split brained

fork devil tongue

scooping

nasty

out at people

like waking up

half hanging

out of your own mouth

and swollen, gory

being too big to fit

back in

a panic of being seen

like zoo limbs

like cages

every flesh beneath transparent

matters

cavities

it seems to the eye

but like rock like elephants

balancing for circus

on every motion

even words

which are featherweight

with liqueur

laurels on other peoples shoulders

and bouldering

unshifting

days later

apologies don’t have the brawn

to shift that

like the World

to be anti-gravity

and weightless

like everyone else

to be moving over and around

you

a litter

a turd

in the street

in the bed

in the inbox

like you

the physicality of brain dead

like sleep memory

like waking

remembering

a man paying you

for bursting his flesh

squeezing him like a pimple

a horror chorus

of slimy dove

a dream a dream thank fuck a dream

you realise upon pillow

exhausted

before the day

is even clothed

like strangled time

like mime

a sign-language synopsis

spat out by the brain

in ill-humored

epithets

that promises to rest

once the body

has spat out the blood

and booed

at you enough

to be finally

done

Ex-Easter Island Head, Wolstenholme Creative Space, 22.01.10

2010-01-25T19:26:00.003Z

The bizarro brilliant brain-child of that bloke who plays guitar with Balloons - Mr. Ben Duvall - and also featuring the talents of George Maund from Indica Ritual, Ex-Easter Island Head is a totally fucking awesome example of stepping outside the fucking box, pissing all over it, filling it with dogshit, setting fire to it and then leaving the stinking thing on the front porch of Jo-Whiley’s indie boy-band twat factory.

Set up as three de-tuned guitars, all featuring a limited amount of strings, and balanced incongruously atop of three optimistic looking keyboard stands, Ben and George perform an ambient, percussive victory of grumbling, exquisite, exorcised noise accomplished with only a tense amount of extreme concentration and drum mallets hammering against strings and guitar faces.

Simplistic in it’s lack of vocals, the momentum is carried by slow build up’s of rhythm and repetition which chime discordantly like bells announcing a lost hour to a an already lost World. The whole piece is incredibly percussive of time and of hidden dimensions between time - like a momento-mori in which the skull beats against it’s own life-span.

The performance is terse and breathless, it has a delicate, tribal, dystopia to it - at their first gig supporting The Portico Orchestra in The Kazimier, there was an intensity which no-one dared breathe against. One slip of timing or misjudgment of rhythm and the whole piece is fucked. Thankfully, the piece never reaches this point - and instead pummels itself on flawless and mesmeric.

Ex-Easter Island Head are, in fact, the soundtrack of Alice In Wonderland’s clock watching rabbit. Thumping, paw-pound Earth and watch tapping, the chimes of time, purpose and urgency shaking the fur from the brain outwards. None of it makes sense, per se, but follow it like Alice and you’ll be granted a half hours sweet, distracting release from your own tempered existence.

Promise.

Albummm Revuuue: Charlotte Gainsbourg: IRM

2010-01-24T22:46:00.002Z

Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of those impossibly perfect women. The kind of woman whom, if you were to be exposed to their presence for more than an hour would no doubt break any merit of self-esteem you once held for yourself.

Stunningly beautiful as well as being an insanely talented actress (did you see her in Anti-Christ? I’m Not There? Fucking hell...) and musician, it’s enough to make you want to stay in the bed for the next week and take stock of your under-achieving, slacker life thus far.

IRM then is another trophy for the Charlotte Gainsbourg shelf of awesomeness. Named, interestingly, after the french designation of the MRI machine which bounced soundwaves off her cerebral tissue following a brain haemorrhage three years ago, the album is stunningly low-key and somehow also dreamily epic by the same turns. It’s a truly gorgeous achievement that manages to be eerie, cheery and heartfelt and uncompromising in it’s desire heavy, breathy production.

The imprint of album producer and co-writer, Beck is undeniable on the album with many songs, in particular ‘Heaven Can Wait’ and ‘Time Of The Assassins’ on which he shares vocal duties, as well as the electro-drone of ‘Trick Pony’. But it’s still irrefutably Gainsbourg’s album - if just in terms in terms of substance and lyricism, despite the immediately identifiable Beck arrangements.

Having said all that though, the album is still something of an awkward fugue between the delicate, haunting folk and dream pop of it’s first half and the onslaught of genre confused songs which litter the later tracks, skipping between Kills-esque electro, country and dark experimentalism.

The album works best when it’s at it’s most simplistic - confessional and explorative of darkness - allowing itself to delight with a brooding and thoughtful set of arrangements punctuated with soft vocals, strings, percussion and piano. The song’s ‘La Collectionneuse’ and ‘In The End’ are especially exquisite, and daringly bare.

It’s a shame that IRM is somewhat blighted by the songs of it’s latter half - song’s which actually, when stood alone, are enjoyable enough - they just don’t work within the context of the album, which is fantastic for it’s strength of storytelling. The story is spilt open and totally interrupted by the intrusion of electro, which feels abrasive and ill-timed. But in the power of storytelling, perhaps this is exactly what Gainsbourg wants - after all, this is a woman unafraid to shock and push boundaries as fucking far as she needs to in order to get the story told.

Inconsistant or not - the album is utterly sumptious anyway despite it's odd failings, and could become a definite nightcap favourite in no time at all.

Official Website: http://www.charlottegainsbourg.com/

IRM is released 25.01.10 and can be bought here: http://tinyurl.com/yl6srrj

Henry Rollins live @ Liverpool O2 Academy, 20.01.10

2010-01-23T11:32:00.002Z

Henry Rollins is a man who easily divides opinion. For every legion of die-hard Rollins disciple, there’s also a legion of die-hard haters, banging their heads against tables in sheer revulsion to a man they see as nothing but a self-indulgent, wide necked pillock.

Nonetheless, whichever side of the Rollins border you stand, there’s no denying that he’s an incredibly engaging and passionate bloke with a helluva tale to tell. I mean, come on, the man fronted Black Flag for a good five years, counts Ian ‘Fugazi / Minor Threat’ Mackaye AND William fucking Shatner as close friends and has probably done a great deal more advocacy for a number of human rights issues in the past ten years than braindead Bush even attempted to think about in his entire 8 years in clown office.

In short - there’s very few men who can hold the undivided attention of an entire venue of people for two and half hours by talking non-stop. No interval. Rollins doesn’t even take a sip of water, or a breath for the whole of that time. Most people zone out just hearing their other halves saying hello to them - nevermind a whole sermon.

The set is as you’d expect it to be. Full of cutting witticisms observing the constant fuckeries, idiocy and inadequacies of global politcs and personal anecdotes, all expressed with a candor of passion and warmth that is incredibly engaging.

He begins with a piece about freedom of speech, leading him into an anecdote about once having a book censored for writing something derogatory about Sting, concerning the droll self-important singers attempts to save Willie Mandela’s cat from a tree with fellow meat head, Bono.

He peppers the set with wonderfully personal anecdotes about spending Thanksgiving (i.e. ‘the fake holiday’) with The Shatners’, replete with a now customary Shatner impression, having a hall full of rowdy pepped-up graduates bust open their gowns to reveal Black Flag t-shirts following what sounded like the most motivational graduate speech in the World as well as the time him and Ian Mackaye forged fake ID’s to go see an early Bad Brains performance.

When Rollins isn’t going on about his personal life, odd turns of career and confusedly lusting after ‘beautiful, long legged drag queens’ during his cameo as guest host for Ru-Paul’s Drag Race, he’s delivering verbal pummeling’s towards some of politics most easily targeted villains. Most notable is his biting onslaught against Sarah Palin, describing the joyless, pump-pump-squirt boning between her and her husband in order to procreate ‘more white people’ - ‘why the fuck else would anyone think they NEED to have 5 children?’ he muses, wryly, pointing out that Palin is ‘constant, comedy gold’ for her constant idiocies.

Where Rollins properly shines though, is when he really gets into his politics, touching topics usually made quite inaccessible to the masses for their sheer harrowing nature, and the heavy handed way with which they’re reported. Insightful and invigorating, his experiences lead into strikingly impassioned tales and rants ranging from the union carbide disaster of Bhopal in 1984 - the toxins of which still pollute the groundwater in the area, to this day - to the extreme inequalities of Sharia Law.

Engrossing, educational, often hilariously self-deprecating and deadpan, Rollins’ performance is one of rare substance, structure and intrigue. Catch him if you can - just make sure you take a good cushion along - two and half hours sat rapt on the edge of a very unforgivingly plastic chair is no holiday on the heiney. True story.

Official Website: http://21361.com/

Vivian Girls @ Korova 18.01.10

2010-01-23T11:27:00.003Z

Seeing The Vivian Girls live is reminiscent of times past and possibly present/future, involving putting Dreamboat Annie by Heart on repeat, building a fort out of duvets and crawling inside to dreamily pine and suffer oneself for another lost loser love with a stupid haircut.

Sigh.

What a dreamboat.

They’re the sort of band that Daria - remember that show? The dry, deadpan, apathetic MTV generation’s answer to Bart fucking Simpson - would have creamed over.

Yes, the lyrics are for the most part like diary entries bemoaning the activities of mean, emotionally vapid young men and the shit dealt hand of being bloody female, but they’re delivered with a dreamscape cadence that makes it sound more like an echoing reminiscence than an actual present, immediate suffering.

And so it is that The Vivian Girls performance tonight comes with a veneer of teenage nostalgia -of having friends rally around you with a bottle of MD 20/20 and a Breeders mix tape to make the unbearable bearable.

It’s certainly a sentiment that seems contagious and apparent in the faces of the audience who beam with comforted adulation throughout the set.

TVG have a sweet, intimate presence on stage which is refreshingly bullshit free. Their onstage affectionate chemistry is beautiful and there’s a total deviation from the current trend of female performance which seems to require burying oneself beneath 15 layers of fancy dress apparel and 30 further layers of make up and just being vacantly weird for the bloody sake of it.

Songs Never See Me Again and Can’t Get Over You are supreme examples of their lo-fi, cutting confessional style, delivered with totally straight, near-deadpan vocals and blissfully disenchanted vocal harmonies.

Out For The Sun however showcases their prowess for furious near-prog ecstasy, with guitarist Cassie Ramone supplying jagged solo’s to drummer Ali Koehler’s simplistic but aggressively raw percussive style.

Bassist Kickball Katy really shines for this song though - providing a bass line so sumptuous that it could probably be packaged up and sold in sex shops as an arousal aid. She struts into the audience proudly, backing herself straight into people and grinning wide with total delight.

An Acapella rendition of The Chantels’ He’s Gone is another piece of absolute pure joy, made all the more endearing for their fuck ups - having to re-start the song for having gone out of tune and then having to finish the song early for the same reason - all garnished with a delicious fit of giggles which, frankly, you don’t see enough of at gigs. Especially on a sodding Monday when you well and truly need to witness people publicly fucking up in any way and just laughing it off.
It. Makes. Life. Better.

They’re quite amazing, actually, in their talent to swing between total effectual minimalism and raw, distorted noise. They have a great control live which never sees their vocals get overtly emotional or vulnerable, despite the confessional aspect of their music. Any emotion that was there is fed into distortion, the pound of a drum skin, a harmony, a repeated lyric, an echoed line.

Before I Start To Cry and Tension are perfect examples of TVG’s ability to denote their lyricism through dynamics - terse, low key verses spill into built up choruses and finales, with Before I Start To Cry seeing Katy donning a tambourine for the first part of the song, which is probably the most open we ever see the girls during the performance.

However, TVG do work to a formula which, though perfect for listening to in your bedroom with, say, a pack of smokes and a feuding ex-lover, doesn’t quite hold the attention for the entirety of a live show. Instead the set deteriorates a little while before the final song with similar sentiments and styles blending many songs into an attention deficit strangle that lacks desperately needed energy.

But then again, if TVG are the musical equivalent of Daria Morgendorffer, then a lack of energy is exactly to be expected. And applauded!

Hail apathy!

Maybe this reviewers just a little peeved cos they didn’t play I Believe In Nothing. And the final bus came and went in the time it took to wait for it.

Sigh.

Ah well, time to crawl under the duvet fort and pine and bemoan the exemption of this song from the evening.

What a dreamboat.

Official Site: http://www.freewebs.com/viviangirls/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc

Buy Everything Goes Wrong by the Vivian Girls: http://tinyurl.com/y9a8nte

Har Mar Superstar interview

2010-01-23T11:13:00.009Z

...with yours truly.

Horror? Quite.

The Moral Of The Story

2010-01-13T22:27:00.008Z

fucking

of it

is more fun

yourself

face

for the sake

than just punching

in the fucking

face

yourself

is more fun

of it fucking

in the fucking

than just punching

for the sake

Fucking

for the sake

of it

is more fun

than just punching

yourself

in the fucking

face.

A Man I Met In The Art Gallery Where I Supposedly Work

2010-01-08T00:36:00.008Z

If I don’t take a break every now and then and talk to someone

I’ll die

that’s what he said

short stumpy nervously scraping

the scalp under his baseball cap at regular

intervals

tabloid rag rolled up into the breast

of his jacket like a spare limb a crutch a weapon

a page 3 tit

peeking

out at me like a winking blind

man with an infection

me fuckin social worker Rob - I call him nob-head like -

tried to teach me how to use a fucking

diary fucking gobshite fucking silver spoon

21 year old shitbag

he said

21 fresh out of daddys wallet he can fuck off the cunt

I nod. he probably is a cunt.

and then doctor nob-head - he’s even fucking worse

you wanna talk about cunts - he was doctor cunt

that one right gobshite gave me a fucking notebook

to write down all me fucking fears and fanny-feelings in fuck off

doctor cunt - posh as anything he was - and a right nob-head

I tells him

IM NOT PUTTING NONE OF THAT FUCKING SHIT IN A BOOK FOR YOU TO HAVE A GOOD CHUCKLE

AT WHILST YOU'RE TAKIN A SHIT

I nod. Doctor cunt sounds like the type of person to do that.

He pulls his cap off.

A long deep canyon of a scar runs from his eyebrow to his scalp.

See this part of the ‘ead ‘ere love? He points at it. cold cold cold.

That’s where me brain popped there, love.

Oh, I say.

He’s whispering. The conversation feels illicit.

How did you pop your brain?

Don’t know. Doctor said it just happens. But see ‘ere, girl? He points

at it again. cold cold cold.

That’s the part of the brain that handles identity. Fucked, aint I?

I nod. I suppose he is.

Y’see girl, I’d like to write down me whole life story. I can tell yer what happened

when I was 4 and me mam left me in a trolley outside the supermarket, or when I was 8 and the nuns caned me hand so ‘ard that I bled all over me biro, but I couldn’t tell yer about me wedding day or where I went yesterdee mornin’, you understand.

I nod. I guess. I once got so drunk that I forgot an entire year.

Plus, I haven’t got the patience to write more than a page. Doctor cunt says thats a good thing. He says if I had more patience I’d probably want to do more and doing more might kill me huuhuuherrrr.

Fuck. Why don’t you write it as a haiku?

A haiku? Bloody hell love, I had a brain hemorrhage, not a cold.

He leaves.

I get back to work. Whatever that entails.

Moja, Kazimier, Liverpool, 05.01.10

2010-01-07T17:50:00.005Z

Fucking global warming. You turn up for work in the morning thinking there’s only a small amount of pissing snow about the place, and before you know it it’s 3pm, the city centre is gridlocked to fuck, you can’t get home and the World quite possibly (and hopefully) is taking it’s final nose-dive into climax.

However, this is Liverpool and a bit of pissing snow and a complete and utter lack of public transport doesn’t stop anyone from going out. Even the highly probable occurrence of sauntering arse over tit on black ice, and getting battered by snowball-packing local scallies (and they know how to pack em so it really fucking hurts) isn’t enough to stop us.

And thank Christ, because every bone breaking shiver and public humiliation on ice is worth it to have seen Moja live.

You’ll be forgiven for not knowing a single bloody thing about them, a two piece from Japan who’re only just beginning to create an audible buzz about them. But sweet Christ they’re good.

Drummer Masumi Sakurai, in particular, is a wild, feckless, she-devil on the skins. Her hair thrashing forward like a burst black cloud continuously throughout the slightly short-lived but intense set. Her arms move so fast they’re barely visible - it wouldn’t be unfair to suspect that she’s been exposed to some kind of gene modifying Space rock that’s mutated her body to levels of superhero stature. It’s quite the super power to have.

In many ways Sakurai feels a lot like the front of the band. There’s a deeper lyricism and potency to her performance than there is to fellow bandmate, bassist and vocalist Haruhiko Higuchi. He carries the set well, sure, and his skills on the bass are not to be sneered at, but its Sakurai that you can’t take your eyes of for a second.

The set is explosive and terse. The Kazimier is bloody freezing, and Moja are exactly what the joint needs in order to create enough audience kinesis to keep it above the minus temperature. A triumph of post-rock distortion that veers surreptitiously and subtly towards dance on occasion. There’s elements of drum solo jazz exquisiteness too that rails tunes beautifully off the path you expect them to go down.

Penultimate song ‘Hello’ is forgivably jarring at times, going on for at least 3 minutes longer than it needs to with a chorus that is horrifically similar in lyricism and anthemic repetition to that tune U2 had out a few years back. You know, the one that they used to advertise i-pods with and felt like getting fisted by Bono himself every time you heard it. But still, Moja are so endearing and fucking brilliant anyway that you couldn’t care. It’s just a pleasure to be in the audience witnessing them.

When the set ends, it’s all far too soon. Like a love affair that finishes in the same bed and evening that it all began. The cold’s outside waiting and the World didn’t end. If they could have played for even just half an hour more, the walk back home would have been made all that little bit more bearable. But nevermind.

In short, Moja are well worth getting involved in, and you should do it soon before the NME gets onto them and ruins the whole thing by labeling them up as the new Japanese White Stripes.

Moja on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/moja777

Buy their lovely new album: http://www.roughtrade.com/site/shop_results.lasso?search_type=advanced&search_terms=moja

In Sleep, Marrying The Sea

2010-01-07T00:59:00.002Z

Heard

the birds chime

discordant decorative

as though hung

from trees the wind gasping

through their

open throats

Heard

the sand heavy petted

and virginal

obediently swallowed

by the sea

Heard

my own feet intimate

on grain like corpses

rattling on the trophy

stick of a hunter

slapping

the sand like a slavery

chant a torment

applause

Heard

the sea revolt

and perish

against within

within against

within upon

against

itself

a turgid

masturbation

kneading itself aggressive

to dry

still placid

rock

clawing the seams

of the beach

for support

Heard

the belching

tide greedy

bloated

a gorilla chest-pound

roar

of bloke idiom

powerless to resist

powerless to this

I will have you have you have

you

Heard

the heart faulty

mechanics

stereo to mono

fuse blown quick slick

dramatics

the drum roll

following a poor

joke

Heard

the choke and struggle

the chuckle

Heard

the limp limbs

and swollen brain

Heard

fluid

mesmeric move

Heard

bones cackle

and snap

Heard

cracked porcelain

and pirouettes

Heard momentary

Heard solid

Heard ellipses

Heard sweet chorus

silence

the ocean

licking at lungs

lips tongue toes

tits stomach sphincter

spine me-oh-mine-oh-

yours

frenched

fresh

sucked

off

Spat

me back

onshore

bored

breathless

like all love

songs

say

honey

moon

half

there