The Moz-pot

I’ve had an unusually strong response this week – in both directions – to the Morning Star column about Morrissey and David Walliams. Funny, because I was expecting a much bigger response to the violently angry blog entry, which never came. I guess if you write about a galvanising figure (La Moz more than La Wally), your readership will be ambivalent. 

One of the column’s keenest critics is Jim Bob’s manager and acetastic Englishman-in-LA blogger Marc. But I find his emailed responses so fascinating, enjoyable and amusing that I must be careful not to deliberately write columns just to catch his attention – I’m ashamed to say I focused on Morrissey at least partly inspired by knowing Marc was listening to his new album (in at number 11 in the USA no less!) and would react strongly to my opinion. Anyway, we’ve spent a lot of time together and love arguing about things.

This morning, Rifa and me walked around Preston Park and it was lovely in the sunshine, hardly anyone there except a few pooch-draggers. Reminded me for the first time in ages why I love Brighton so much, contrasting with regular thoughts recently of moving on somewhere else. If only California weren’t bust. 

Hmm, I think I’ll write about Battlestar Galactica and the BBC’s coverage of the U2 album next.

euro tour diary #3 – gone tits

ST GALLEN (calm before the storm)
I forgot to tell you how boss our dinner was, back in Lucerne, in the Fuckhaus, where I had breaded aubergine and polenta – discovering against expectations that I love polenta. Here in St Gallen it’s also delicious: potato-cake things with a rich sauce and vegetables, plus incongruous unsauced pasta on the side, which I ignore. No more pasta til Italy. Switzerland has provided some of the best posh veggie food I’ve tried. 

The hotel is also nice but the shower is in the corner of the bedroom with not even a curtain, so we take turns to sit outside the room while the other jumps in the shower. Would be fun for lovers but a bit annoying today.

Grabenhalle is ace fun. A slightly older, folkier crowd. During the time it takes for Frank and me play our sets, standing in front of a big circular window (hence tonight’s ‘Porthole Concert’ event name), almost two feet of snow falls, totally burying the town. I’ve got lush footage of the sets with fat flakes falling behind us.

The night unfolds messily. Half the audience sticks around and Frank jams tipsy NoFX covers sat on the edge of the stage. We’re alternating appenzeller with whisky thanks to a(nother) forthright bar manager who won’t see us empty-glassed and at the very end I do three uberdrunk extra songs, including a Swiss-German-ised Hedgehog Song. Then we all pile outside, build a massive snowman called Steve in the carpark and have a vicious snowball fight. Frank falls down and cuts his elbow quite badly. That night he’ll leave a disturbing amount of blood on his bedsheets, leading to an embarrassed check-out.

In the morning, covered in snow, St Gallen is an opulent Catholic town but bits of the old town were ruined when a bank bought it all, tore it down and build a ‘red square’ precinct, painting several streets bright red and commissioning a former socialist artist to sell her soul, building massive red-painted installations. It’s gross.

We’ve had a fantastic morning. Then we drive four hours through driving rain and heavy traffic to Geneva and at some point during the journey our karma goes to shit…

GENEVA


The airport straddles France and Switzerland. We need to drop the car off at Avis on the French side of the border, to avoid a massive international surcharge. It’s only half a mile away from the main Swiss airport but somehow SatNav can’t find it and Avis have no address for it. We drive around a bit getting frustrated, then go to the Swiss branch of Avis to ask for help and they kindly give us a hand-drawn map. It’s getting late so we phone the promoter, who will come to the French side to drive us to the venue.

But the Swiss map proves to be utter shit. We drive around Geneva Airport 11 times (I shit you not) adding an hour and 70km to our journey. Meanwhile our promoter Luc got there just by walking through the airport.

We finally find it. At which point Avis stick us for an extra day because apparently we should’ve dropped the car off by 11am. First I’ve heard of it. Also, we slipped over the mileage limit driving round in circles. After a fight, they relent on the mileage and fuel at least. Here’s the beef: according to French staff, the Swiss map we were given is deliberately inaccurate, because the two Avis branches hate each-other and the Swiss side loses money when punters drop cars off on the French side. Or something like that. Anyway, utter smackable fucktards in my book.

So finally shot of the car, we head across town to the venue, at which point we discover we left Frank’s laptop in the hire car. Aaargh! Luc, who is a prince, drives back to the airport while we soundcheck. Tiki’s is a sexy Hawaiian-themed retro bar run by hardcore punkers. It’s fantastic but we’re super-late (and knackered as shit) so just check and play. Luckily it doesn’t affect either show but afterwards I feel so self-consciously stinky and tired, it’s hard to talk to anyone properly.

And then, the worst conclusion to the day possible. Because we’re up at 5am, Luc has just put us up in a Youthhostel and – fuckfuckfuck – we’re in a shared room with strangers! If I’d known even an hour earlier I would’ve happily paid the difference for a private room. We walk into a space the size of my own bedroom at home, but it’s crammed with bunkbeds full of smelly, drunk, snoring and farting Eurofucks. Utterly dismayed but tiredness defeats disgust and I collapse fully-clothed onto an odourous bottom bunk. 

GENEVA – ZURICH – VIENNA
Four hours later, we’re up, unshowered, legging it through dark frozen streets to catch the 6.30am train from Geneva to Vienna, via Zurich: 3 hours to Zurich, 12 minutes to change trains, 8-9 hours to Vienna. Croissant and coffee. Guardian.

What follows, despite kinked circumstance, is the most jaw-droppingly beautiful journey I’ve ever taken. We sleep at first. Then after leaving Zurich we head high into the Alps and cross above a series of snowbound, forested valleys like nothing I’ve ever seen.

We’re in an old-fashioned private compartment of six seats. We have our laptops linked via Bluetooth, so we can talk shit about the various people who come into ‘our’ compartment during the journey. Eventually we get rumbled by two haughty women from Liechtenstein who were offensively blasé about the scenery and don’t react well to being mocked by two scruffy English musicians.

There’s even a reasonable restaurant car, although we have to take turns to go eat because all our luggage is in the compartment. 

VIENNA


We get to Vienna four minutes late, after eight hours traveling, and other passengers are moaning. I wish them all a long British train ride for healthy perspective.

Flying Pig bar owner Paul picks us up. Paul and me lived together for a year at college in the mid-90s but I haven’t seen him since and we’ve only had contact on Myspace. He’s different from how I remember: a quirky bar owner, complete with full-on Austrian accent, married to a Korean action movie star. The bar and gig and whole night are eccentric. The sound is almost impossibly quiet because the speakers are spread through the Flying Pig and there’s no monitoring. Sounds like a truly unplugged show. It’s also very busy with a heavy hardcore contingent but the crowd is weird and can’t decide whether to talk through us or get into it. We both win them over and I begin to think Vienna might have a happy ending.

…btw at this point I realise I accidentally smuggled a (very small) helping of something naughty through seven countries. Moron! Was forgotten in a coat pocket – must be a really common thing to do and I’m just lucky it wasn’t the kind of stuff that a sniffer dog might notice. I’ll leave it behind in Vienna – there were too many armed cops on the train and at the Swiss border… nasty thoughts…

The most interesting people in Vienna are two Stoke guys and an Australian girl living in Budapest offering open house to anyone who strays by (and through couchsurfing.com), making their living by online gambling. They are scarily young, only just out of teens, yet like something out of a hip movie and their leader is one of the brightest, almost eerily composed guys I’ve ever met. I suggest they watch Grifters because they’d make a stunning scam team and they’re currently locked out of half the gambling sites. We would love to party late with these dudes but we’re just too flaked. Pause to add Budapest to the next EU tour city list. 

We stay in Paul’s flat, while he sleeps in the backroom of his bar. Oddly, his flat has a shower in the kitchen. He says he’ll pick us up at 7am the next morning from the flat, to get his keys back and pay us.

We wake up at 6.30am. A second day operating on 4 hours’ sleep. 

At 7.15am there’s no sign of Paul. We phone him and leave messages. At 7.30 we phone again and pack our gear in a panic. By 7.40am we’re wandering the streets desperately seeking a taxi. Forty minutes and €50 later, we’re at the airport. More phone messages: we still have Paul’s keys and he still has all our money! Come on, where are you man!? Fuck! 

We check in and just make the flight, mainly because it’s been delayed by 30 minutes. It’s a tiny prop plane with 20 other people onboard. Coffee and croissant. Financial Times. Flying low over more Alps and across the Adriatic, south-west into Italy, towards Bologna Airport. And as the Italian booker’s assistant Laura meets us at Bologna, Paul is waking up and leaving messages. But we’ll leave him to our agent now to get our money and I’ll tell you about the last three days in Italy when I’m safely home.  

teaching creationism

Isn’t it funny how creationists always seem so… unevolved?
Bill Hicks

I feel quite sorry for the Royal Society’s director of education, Michael Reiss, for the heat he’s taken over the last few days, after his daft suggestion that, to appease a small minority of UK kids (still fewer than 10%) who have an in-built opposition to evolutionary theory (thanks to their upbringing), discussion of creationism should be included in science class.

He’s dead wrong of course. Strategically, morally and historically. And there’s a slight chance, I guess, that he’s deliberately stirring the pudding with Satan’s wooden spoon to cause problems for his fellow scientists. 

But let’s face it, he’s an old fella, it’s much more likely he’s just weary of the insanity, tired of allowing the subject to become the elephant in the room, and trying to plot a tidy, less stressful route through the mess.

One could almost begin to suspect that those stoking up the storm around his comments are trying to encourage creationist/unintelligent design elements to fight harder. It concerns me that the BBC and other media outlets (especially the liberal ones) gave the story such heady prominence, when Reiss’ original comments were just one bloke, and came couched in such careful terms.

Forget the inflammatory subject matter for a sec and look at this in general terms: since when did what kids believe when they show up at school have an effect on what teachers impart in class!? That’s right, they’re also adding Second Life to geography, pot-smoking to art class, emo studies to the RE curriculum and setting up a GCSE in Facebook apps.  

The subtext that really needs facing is this: kids with an inbuilt ‘disbelief’ in the overwhelming, extraordinarily compelling amount of evidence that backs up evolutionary theory have been brainwashed to a degree that comes close to child abuse by fanatically religious nutsack parents. They don’t need convincing, they need rescuing. End of.

I just discovered Poe’s Law, which relates originally to creationism but is now expanded to take in wider fundamentalism. First described by Nathan Poe in observation of debates on a religious website, the law states:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

Poe’s Law leads inevitably to Poe’s Paradox, which infects almost all fundamentalist organisations of any size online:

In any fundamentalist group where Poe’s Law applies, a paradox exists where any new person (or idea) sufficiently fundamentalist to be accepted by the group, is likely to be so ridiculous that they risk being rejected as a parodist (or parody).

Beautiful. You really can’t argue with fundamentalists but you can snigger like mad as you walk the fuck away.

Let’s come at it from the other end. Instead of demanding the god botherers shut the fuck up about what ludicrous inanities they think should be taught, let’s add some of our own ‘truths’ into the mix.

The Norse or Greek creation myths, for example. Let’s teach Sherlock Holmes as historical fact – lots of kids turn up at school believing in Sherlock Holmes. And of course we need to teach the Presidency of Josiah Bartlett as historical truth – there’s as much real evidence for it as there is for the 8,000 year-old planet. It was on TV, for a start.

The Lizards, The Scientologist and Marc Riley

Me and Tom White jump in the Electric Soft Parade van (a well customised and lived-in Merc sprinter that steers like a dream compared to the last one I drove) and head north for the first leg of our co-headline tour. I’m increasingly secure driving these beasts and after the last blog entry, I’ve started planning a coffee-table picture book of tour splitters and their bands. Awesome idea, Chris.

Before leaving town we scoot across to Metway Studio, where Tom’s brother Alex is demoing with The Pipettes, to drop him off a spare guitar. Chatting outside the van on a sunny Brighton morning, suddenly a lizard runs along the pavement. It’s about 3 inches long.

We get to York in reasonable time but then the Satnav (she’s called Madame Swish) lets us down (that’s twice so far) and it takes 40 minutes to find the venue. They’re nice about it though – lucky we’re acoustic or there’d've been no chance of getting checked. I forgoe a soundcheck, so my set is entirely acoustic, but it goes well and I enjoy myself more than expected.

Tom reprises his monumental Nina Simone cover, which took the room apart in south London a couple of days before, in a venue that didn’t deserve us.

In the evening Charlie phones to tell me a funny story: walking with his daughter, they spotted a lizard in the street. I can’t believe it, it’s a 2 lizard trip.

After York, we’re hosted by Sam and his friends, who’ve just finished college. It’s a household of musicmakers and fans, yet it’s spotless and comfortable – which is rare – and you can feel a slight air of sadness that they’re about to go separate ways. 

The next morning, eating breakfast in a café, we’re leaning into a conversation about appalling religions and obviously Scientology comes up, thinking about that poor kid who is being taken apart by The Met for waving a banner at a protest that used the word ‘cult’ with reference to Hubbard’s Hoons. Suddenly the middle-aged woman on the adjacent table introduces herself with a broad smile – she runs York Scientology Centre. Cripes! She launches into a broad defence of her ‘faith’ that within one minute is becoming a brazen attempt to recruit. That took balls, it must be said. Well, either balls or the funneled focus of unquestioning faith. She’s full of holes but friendly and (I think) sincere. Her starting point plays down the religious side almost entirely – describing instead a benign business networking opportunity and a chance to self-improve. Quickly though, she openly accepts some of the looming tenets I find most disturbing, while determinedly dressing them up as positive spirituality.

Interestingly, despite running a centre in a town, she is still a volunteer and not doing her OT levels (or whatever they’re called) yet – so one gets a real feel for how deep members have to go before they start to gain any ‘intuition’. No answers, anyway.

I’m not going to call her the 3rd lizard of the trip because that would be mean (!)… But the whole time we were talking (which must have been at least 30 minutes), her companion – an unsmiling younger man – sat silent and still, not reading or even looking around curiously, waiting for her to finish, seemingly eternally patient. If you told me he hadn’t blinked I wouldn’t have been surprised. Or that he can re-grow his leg if you bite it off.

We say goodbye and drive to Manchester. Matt Thwaites’ band Restlesslist are doing Marc Riley’s show on BBC6Music this evening and Tom is drumming. On the way, we do a quick stop-off at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where a young sheep escapes and has to be harried back through an open gate by punters. Then we rumble over the Pennines and park up at the Beeb, where we head for the bar.

Restlesslist are storming, doing complex, instrumental psyche prog-pop (spacerock?). Bloody ace – and it’s nice to meet Marc. Refreshing to see a DJ at that level actually playing entirely from CDs (and some bloody brilliant ones to boot) and just wanting to talk music, not bollocks.

And when that’s done we’ve got to make it to Glasgow for midnight…

 

Tour diary #1 – a house full of crisps

Settling into it.

One advantage with having a lovely Big Proper Booking Agent is you tend to get an actual rider, instead of someone dragging out 24 cheap lagers and some Coke. The upside of that is the bottle of whiskey we scored in Birmingham. The downside (relatively… well, no, actually it’s another upside) is my house is now full of crisps. I could eat a pack twice a week for a year and we’re still only 3 shows in. Maybe we should make like China Drum did in the 90s and throw a party after the tour to feed everyone Walkers cheese and onion.

By the way, before I start, should mention I had a letter from Brighton Council about my last entry but, despite shrill tone, they don’t say anything worth repeating. Legalese / splitting hairs aside, they’re a bunch of culture-crippling farters. Anyway…

Jenny drove us from Brighton to Oldham by 3pm for a radio session, during which I broke a string. Impressive driving.

In Manchester we liked the venue so much we went back for breakfast. Trick came out and also top composer and old friend Ian Vine and his missus flautist Jen stayed out late drinking, so the nervous first night of the tour felt like a proper one straight away. Jen can identify single malt scotches by smell, to a startling degree for a well-spoken American. Starfighterpilot finally made it to a show, which was nice, except we didn’t get a chance to chat properly. And Jimmy Doherty – but he couldn’t talk at all, silenced by laryngitus and trying to write everything on a notepad.

In Birmingham, the Academy’s safety barriers (in front of the stage) were so tall – and support act Lucy & The Caterpillar is so tiny – that you could only see her head poking over the top, as she sang her songs about homemade stuffed-toy owls and meeting boys at Kings Cross Station. Sweet. Ben Calvert opened. Both were very good but having two acoustic acts on made the atmosphere slightly too ’songwriter club’ rarified for my taste. Lucky the (small) crowd was lovely and dealt with the shift in volume. Ended up doing solo encores on the floor and did Hedgehog Song by request, which is an odd thing to close with. I wish Lucy had heard it because she does animal songs too.

First signs are, people really like the ‘Fighting Fire’ t-shirts, which is a relief.

We stayed at an Etap. It’s a French version of Travelodge I guess. The rooms are like pods – the family room has a child’s bunkbed horizontally above the double-bed. Then there’s the shower, which opens right out into the bedroom rather than having a bathroom of its own. Johny loved it but I won’t be going back. I’m sharing a hotel room with a woman who isn’t my wife – I don’t want it to be tiny.

Awesome Danish band Efterklang were there, so we said excited hellos (I DJed at one of their Brighton shows a couple of years ago and they know my friend Shaun, who is promoting their next Brighton date) but they were having a tough time: one member was sent home by UK immigration, so they’ve had to cancel a gig and hole up in Brum to re-rehearse as a seven-piece.

Meanwhile they were somewhat dazed outside the Etap at 1am, having gotten tangled up with some dodgy goings-on. Basically, a bunch of local lads had booked rooms and were trying to smuggle in hookers by getting people to take the ir room cards out to them. It already smelled hairy when we arrived and half an hour later the police were on site.

Heading to Bath the next day, we stopped in Tewkesbury to look at the Abbey. Lunch in a lush little tea-room called Crumpets, turned out to be their first day open since being flooded out last summer. All of Tewkesbury was near drowned and the Abbey became an island. They have a plaque showing the height of the water and journalists kept coming by to interview them – they got booked for local TV news the next day. Food was delicious (I got laughed at for bottling out of the cream tea – but the rest of my band can get away with cream teas much better than me).

And in Bath, Moles Club was well nice. Promoter Steve and his mate Al were the best gig DJs I’ve heard for a long time, spinning vintage Springsteen up against Two Gallants. Support was Jay Jay Pistolet (stronger songs than I was expecting, pretty damn good) and a terrific rockabilly trio, whose name I never found out.

Just as we’re supposed to go on I have a mini freakout. Earlier, at the end of soundcheck, we were filmed doing ‘4am’ for the venue website. At the end of the song I broke a string – but I had to go straight off to film an interview. And (aarrgh!) I forgot to fix the string. So just as I was setting up to play, I realised I had to replace the top E. That delayed the start and then I immediately snapped a different string during the first song. Thank god Matt Eaton was there to change it, while we did ‘7 Hearts’ (which uses the acoustic guitar). Must work out better contingencies, or source a second guitar!

Finally, a knackering drive all the way back to Brighton in the rain for Jen, who showed more pluck than many would muster: we didn’t even leave the venue til after midnight and it pissed down.

By the way, during this leg of gigging I found out that publishing corporation Newsquest has axed our local culture magazine The Brighton Source, which is A) a dreadful thing for many reasons and B) means my porn article may not see the light of day. Gutted x1000 and I’ll write more about this when I find out firm enough details not to libel anyone.

on prophets

One thing Arthur C. Clarke did that was amazing, quite apart from writing the very most astounding sci-fi ever, was he predicted / invented the geo-stationary orbit for satellites. This is where the orbit speed of the satellite matches the rotation of the Earth, so the satellite ’stays still’ above the same piece of land, allowing its use for communications etc. Clarke described it (ahead of the technology) so accurately, that no single government or company could patent the idea and it became an open globally used piece of innovation that affects every one of us, every day.

This morning I’m utterly gutted (selfishly) that I won’t get to meet him, he’s the last one, my final true childhood hero to pass on.

Interesting how few media outlets have mentioned one of the key issues in the Tibetan uprising: the Chinese government’s kidnap and ‘disappearing’ (read: continued holding) of the young boy, who Tibetans believe to be the Panchen Llama. Even when some of the protestors have placards about him, no news shows seem to be bothered to explain. Oh, it turns out, neither can I.

Read about the Panchen Llama.

We’ve been watching Michael Wood and Jeremy Jeffs’ BBC series The Story Of India, which Rifa got on DVD from her Dad. It’s outrageously good. As beautifully shot and human as Palin, as strong socio-politically as Andrew Marr and better at drawing together threads of ‘big’ history than any other series I’ve seen. Tara Arts’ moments of performance are a bit declamatory for my taste (though it’s probably stylistically appropriate) and the occasional badly-filtered CGI is piss-poor but neither of these go any way towards spoiling the enormous whole.

It starts with this jawdropping revelation: south Indian mystics have handed the same complex chants down for thousands of years. They’d never been recorded or analysed before but just recently were taped and assessed – and they’ve been proved to be older than human language – they have no connection with any known linguistic heritage or ancient music form. In fact, they’re most closely connected to the language patterns of animals, such as birdsong. It’s a direct, living cultural connection to the absolute beginnings of ‘human’ existence. Even better, the villagers in this area themselves have direct genetic links to the first known migration of people, out of Africa and into southern India.

porn, curry and the seaside

I just took my lunchbreak on the beach in the storm and it was outstanding. The pier is shut and the seafront is trashed. There’s bits of plank and rubbish everywhere, with the tidal line of gunk right up by the wall, so the sea has swamped the whole beach at points, way further up than I’ve ever seen. Some kids walked out along the jutting stone cob which has the doughnut statue on it. Then they got utterly sploshed by massive waves, knocked to the ground and left crawling and running away on the ground. I went down to beach level and hung out in what they call the ‘artists quarter’, partially sheltered from the wind and rain but with a worm’s-eye-view of the sea. Magic.

Unfortunately I had some interviews scheduled but my phone was dead – normally it works fine on the seafront, so I guess the storm killed the signal. Now I’m playing interview catch-up.

I’ve been smelling of Indian spices in a disconcerting way. To celebrate my in-laws’ wedding anniversary, we went for a lush meal at Tamarind in Mayfair, which is one of the poshest Asian restaurants I’ve ever been to. The food was delicious and we had a lot of fun. The only thing is, they don’t have a specificially vegetarian main. I’m sure they’ll do all the mains meat-free if you ask, like any place worth its salt, but for some reason I didn’t have the nous to ask, so instead of picking a main, I went for two different side dishes. I had sag paneer and something with new potatoes.

Now I’m guessing here, but I reckon they delicately flavour the main dishes to seal their reputation for subtlety and complexity of flavour, but then, erm, ‘robustly’ flavour the side dishes, so if you eat a main and a side you get a perfect balance of strength and subtlety. Yup, what I’m trying to say is, these two side dishes kicked my arse and I’ve smelled of cumin and turmeric for two days.

Not complaining. The only negative thing was, their lassis are definitely not as good as Kastoori in Tooting, who do the best sweet lassi in London.

The other odd thing I did over this weekend was watched pornography for the first time ever. The local magazine I write for occasionally, Brighton Source, have a regular feature where people do something new, that they haven’t tried before. They aim to go outside comfort zones. The editor James has had colonic irrigation and broken bones snowboarding, plus he’s getting a tattoo in the name of journalism in the near future. Not wanting to let the side down, porn was an obvious choice. Having never seen any before, I’ve now ploughed through a whole range of filthy nonsense in one afternoon. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry! Obviously I’ve got lots to say about it now but I’ll save conclusions for the article.

right I’m going out in the storm

This is too good to miss, I’m going down to the beach. x

Yucca Valley

For now, what happened in the desert stays in the desert. Except…

Saturday night, outside the coffeehouse it’s raining but the moonlit sky seems clear. It’s weird; where’s the rain coming from if there aren’t any clouds? Then we see it: the dark silhouette of a rainbow shape, set against the blackness. It seems impossible but all four of us see it and we aren’t stoned yet.

Here’s the proof we aren’t mad: it’s a moonbow. How blessed we are this night.

Artwork for Capital

For my Capital album I made some artworks of London landmarks for the sleeve, based on our bleached backyard wall. Obviously, these aren’t the final sleeve designs (there’s no text for a start) but here’s an ‘exclusive’ peek at the images themselves.