40

Each man has the unalloyed right to be, at one time,

Or more, a scrambled, bedraggled, hedgeslept Jesus

This or that God knows that I took mine.

So back, so forth,

So much for that.

Born on the banks of the mad, maladjusted Straits;

A mess of medus, Marx, mumbles and moonshine

And purpled, rainworn slate,

I bawled, I suppose, to announce my arrival,

Screeching at and with life; crumpled of face, yelling tailtrod cat.

Awareness yet to fall.

Later, I assume

Still out of tune:

Salvation of sorts in four rusted strings, legs spayed, bass spitting ire;

Bloody fingered, bloody-eyed, bloody-brilliant

Sweatroaring to the choir.

A herniated, half-fried mash rabbleclack from nowhere to where

Half-bent in the head from household highs:

Winterland warriors forswear.

Closer, to heaven,

A cliché at eleven.

Jesus, I write, is the One True Light. The hymn is sung

Cathedral-echo, sanctity. Mankly festering

Unbeliever can crag-cawk also under silhouetted idols,

A dual solo with Watchbreaker Paul, all his heft, his frown

Of  hate reappropriated here. A miracle, an irony.

Sharp shards of treblevoice a piercing crown.

The appeal

None more real:

Marco, blessed Marco, 19, manfully striving,

Has his arms around my neck to fasten my chain.

He’s breathing fast and his eyes are flickering -

I wish I was. I’m older but he’s stronger, I now know,

In soul; questions everywhere, an atmospheromone brash

But I back out, it passes, he goes.

Aftermath

Polygraph:

Debbie, 40, so she says, Kat-like, frizzled at the edges,

On MSN at 3am; unusual, I am, I love it backbody,

She computers late, rush-ready.

Merseyrailed and mohawked I alight to electro harrumph,

Disassociated, terrified, excited, grubby.

Suburban taxi brings amphetamine sleaze-triumph.

Nobody

Believes me:

Lien, then, as we avoid a movie. Gin and sin, we giggle

Suddenly opposite the police station

There’s a field; it’s dark. We fumble and wriggle.

I can’t find it: I’m shaking and hammered. I roll off, roll a smoke

And toke myself away. There’s pride at sort-of,

More-or-less Becoming A Man. Meanwhiles, her knickers stink of puke.

So I pour

Just one more:

Jostling against an ossifying mundanity, I fill in the forms

And the idiots pass it through

And a month later, we’re still drunk, sodden, warm.

Thunderbird Blue, Lagerla, the Pure White Spirit of Russians,

Lager Girl, Cider Woman, Frosty Jack,

The notorious Four Litre Challenge.

Giro cheque

Not here yet.

Awaiting the delinquent sacrament of midnight’s clack

Nervous, scrawled, fuddled; surprised and frozen.

But in another universe I plunge and kiss you back

There, I don’t need to fire my face at the coming breeze, brine, sweat,

Pupils disrupted, mind ripping away the ages as I walk away.

But, ay, sweet truth that everyone deserves in life such a yearning regret.

A storm

Enthralls:

Each line has its own rhythm, as snickled sweet snot dribbles

Neckwards, backwards, inside, upwards,

Re-electrified, laser-eyed, shouting at a skunksome sky in scribbles

Of weasly arrogance; more than alive, driving

Shards of spectacularly fleeting nuclear insight

Out of the world, into another magnesium moment: inverse, farcial-brave.

Time lost

To rank rust?

Each man knows the right, at one time, to be

Scrambled by God, by Jesus, to hedge and to mine.

To dragback a little more of this or that ill-logic amoral or free.

And now? Well, what now, and why now?

These tableaux of sweat and ridicule, fluid in imagination

And in deed. Knowledge is dead; a rank, deluded shallow.

Beyond accumulation, these lives are of as little meaning

As the fracture in time that dropped me here; no doubt

On other planets, if they exist, if this one exists, but fleeting

But here

And there

I link myself back to the faces in the wallpaper

Those forms and shapes and shadows in the drapes.

My child-eyes, terrified, identified, and my screams all were

Of from for the future: trapped, transparent, faces of wastrels and rats

Waiting for harridan lies to land. With deadly vicious beautiful gravity

Any god knows this; so stays silent of acts.

So it was, so it is

And so shall it be

And so much

For all that,

For all

Fall.

The rules of anticulturalism

there is no culture beyond the present

the anticulturalist stands outside himself

the anticulturist is the author of her own lives

gender is a lie

postmodernism is a surrealist art lie

data drowns dreams and this is beautifully inevitable

you do not deserve any more or less than you can conceive and this is beautiful too

all culture is born from appropriation and violence

arbitrary rules are made and broken in order for society to exist and perpetuate

money is the best and sexiest rape lie of all

worth is meaningless value is meaningless

god hates life

it is only theft if it is viewed by others

oblivion is the only true goal and the search for freedom from thought is prohibited by itself it can only be accidental or enforced

birth or death is not an art statement

our pets pity us

language is a joke of a liar

you did leave the oven on and your children are burnt to death

all art is real somewhere there is no such thing as abstraction just a lack of cameras

exploding the earth is the true and beautiful goal of humanity

perception is a lie

culture is death is dead is not pinnable is down

similies are pathetic

getting fucked is all that drives anyone

the ultimate and tragic achievement of humanity is the alarm clock

tomorrow is a convenient lie

memories are lies

nobody believes in nihilism

analysis is autopsy

words are ghosts

paranoia does not exist we are all being targeted all the time and this is fortunate for the perpetuation of anticulturalism

beware the hungry and the horny

revolution is doomed as soon as it is enacted

truth is bunk

A review of a band from 2004 (2004)

From The Fly

KENNEDY SOUNDTRACK, UNWRITTEN LAW
Liverpool Stanley Theatre

There’s a group of lads, around 16-18 years old, moshing jus’ like MTV, during Kennedy Soundtrack’s set. Violent and vehement, the cackling Carlsberg-fuelled roughhousing is as rambunctious as anything Johnny Knoxville ever did. In their dreams. As the seething limbflailers slam each other around this beat-gravid atmosphere, I notice a kid, no more than 13, and dressed down in a sorta mini-me mishmash of nu-metal off-the-peg punk-parsimony, buzzing round the outskirts of the scrimmage.

Whilst the Kennedys’ frontfukka Nic blunderbusses his lyrical way through 24/7, the kid jumps toward the middle of this lairy lot, straining to smackdown with the coolies. He gets an elbow in the head and dazedly kisses the floor. The band roar along regardless, with their Faith No More / RATM reshapings no more evident than on singles Killing Music and Wrong Day.

Brushed aside for a second, third, fourth time, the lad’s soon covered in stale lager and has fagends clinging to his clothes. By the time the Soundtrack leave the stage – after album title track Tale of 2 Cities – he surely must be bruised to buggery and back.

Punk fiends Unwritten Law jaunt their way onstage and produce a melodic threshing machine that’s part No Means No and part Lagwagon. Jump around! Jump around! Pogo! Here we go…

Undaunted by previous treatment, the kid dusts himself down as best he can and dives right back on in. And something strange happens. Suddenly he’s dictating the destruct-gang’s every dancemove. Having been dismissed, teethkicked, bashed and bollixed, his vitality, persistence and blood-battered visage have eventually lent him respec’, poise and status.

The smile as he hits the floor the next time is of triumph, and it hits me with some force that perhaps the kid understands the Music Industry better than all of us.

David Grohl, beardy good rock man (2008)

From The Fly

David Grohl, who has a beard, is quite clearly what you might call A Good Bloke. Never mind all that Nevermind whiny bollocks, his subsequent real band always were a proposition that took some of the friendlier riffs of the rockier side of Grunge and melded them with an unabashed love for classic rock and roll. What this means is that Foo Fighters are not just able but allow themselves to have fun.

Grohl’s popped up in the North a couplea times these last few days as it goes – initially, bouncing onto an Anfield stage alongside Paul McCartney to first fizz through a few riffs of Band On The Run alongside Macca, then to back him on the drumkit during Back In The USSR. The grin on Davey-boy’s face obviated any need for stagelights: it was obvious that a) in contrary to the famous Everton chant, someone in Anfield actually did know their history that night and b) that Grohl was transported back to something of a childhood fantasy. This is what it’s all about, he seemed to say, this rocks. And, of course, it did.

Around twenty hours later, The Grohlstar buzzed onto another enormo-stage forty-odd miles down the M62 for the Foos gig at the City Of Manchester Stadium. It is, beyond any question, a brill footy ground: sat in the main stand, the views were ace though as ever I wanted to dive from the top of the seats into the writhing, moshing throng lucky enough to have snagged standing tickets. Not to worry; the Foos have a set that’s suited to a place like this, and certainly their frontman has the personality and charm to fill it too. “We’re gonna rock!” he screams, “Til we can’t fuckin play no more!” (The exclamation marks are important; everything he says is punctuated with them.) 

He loves it: the crowd roar their approval and Grohl charges round the stage and into the midst of the audience via a walkway that reaches roughly the centre circle. There are drum solos, acoustic interludes, breakdowns in songs for the kids to sing and clap along, even a triangle solo and an extended meet-the-band bit that in the hands of anyone else would border on excruciating, even embarrassing. That it is actually engaging and smile-inducing is testament to the spirit running through the band and by definition therefore their driving force. 

“We’ve been going for twelve years (sic)!” Grohl informs the crowd. “We used to suck! But we’re fuckin good now!” He’s right on the latter part, at least. 

The enormous venue is reflected in the enormous ticket price, but with support from Futureheads and Manic Street Preachers that financial hit is assuaged a tad, and certainly the Foos’ crowd-pummelling triple-dip double-length hit-smashin extravaganza of a set is designed to try and give value for money.

It also shows one thing very clearly: that, in a very real way, there’s really nothing inherently wrong with being A Big Rock Star. And that the dictum is true that you should take what you do seriously, but never yourself.Something perhaps lost on some of his contemporaries back when the world was different and you were allowed to take as much liquid on board a plane as you liked. 

In the face of some of the current paranoia and disillusionment, suspicion and frenzied rush toward A New Bigotry, escapism and happiness are more important than ever they were and Grohl has always understood the power of a smile and One! More! Motherfuckin! Rockin! Song!

Hey! Ho! Let’s go!

At the Manchester Apollo (2008)

From The Fly
The Manchester Apollo is quite a building, and one that in all fairness has seen more than most of us over the years.

As with all old theatres, it has a kind of semi-faded glory and gravitas about it that seems to hint at the ghosts of shows past – narrow your eyes and you can almost sense the spirits music-hall performers at the periphery of your vision, unable or unwilling to quite leave the scene of their essence. Its grandeur allows it a special place in the hearts of those who head out to medium-to-largeish gigs, but a decent booking policy means also that it has the ability to really skip and jump with the prevailing winds.

Take last month or so as an example; it all began for me with a gig by Björk there. The last time I’d seen said Icelander was, boastfully enough, at the start of her Volta tour in 2007. It was a magical occasion at the end of a magical few days over in that magical country involving hair-raising aeroplane rides, fishing and houses named after entire cities, a lot of beer and contemplation of the infinite, shit-talking and devil-dancing in old fishing factories. That gig, at the Ice Hockey arena in Reykjavik, had been wonderful enough but somehow as the night ended I’d found myself putting White Russians on the credit card in a crazily-quiet bar at 4am along with her entire band and the woman herself nursing a lemonade across the bar.

 It was bizarre, and wonderful, and typically 101ish, and I almost missed my flight as a result but was gutted to find I did actually manage to leave the country. In Manc guise, however, Björk’s show was as inventive, challenging and wonderfully rave-centric as it has been for years. Whether shooting silk from her fingers or leading the band in proto-totem-dance, she filled the venue with a kind of blend of in-your-face intelligence and skewed-dream poetry.

It energised and reconciled, resplendent and resonant, political and personal. And as soon as a song labelled itself it would be discarded, or, better, morphed, into another shade of life in all it’s cocked-head, double-take alchemy. It’s hard to write about it without falling into flowery traps, which is why she’s so important. ‘Declare Independence,’ she finally urged, ‘Don’t let them do that to you.’ I used to think it was a track about the Faroe Islands secession from their Danish protectorate (and in a sense it is), but that’s not the whole story: it applies equally, I think, to the ebb and flow and final tide of a failing relationship, or maybe is a call to arms. To never stop dreaming, or looking, for the best in life, not to get bogged down by greyness but to believe in better and to find it on your own terms. Björk is punk rock personified, in the only sense that matters, and the venue filled with glitter to disprove it.

A few days later it was The Kooks’ turn to hit the Apollo, the Brighton poppers at an interesting stage of their still-nascent career. I’d once interviewed them in Ibiza, which was and still is something that makes me smile cause it was a crazy 36 hours that involved hardly any sleep for anyone, and getting up at midnight to go and have lunch before a gig in San Antonio that finished at 6am.

Ibiza rocked that weekend, for sure, and I managed to spend an hour giggling to myself, lying on a beach dipping my jammy Welsh toes in the clearest, bluest Mediterranean sea whilst I thought about how ludicrous life was sometimes. Back then, they were yet to release that debut album and it was such early days that they’d barely done a tour of the toilet circuit, let alone 2,000 capacity venues.

 It was, however, more than obvious that they were going to take off: the record company understood them and were backing them to the hilt with their support, for sure, but in that Manumission gig the charisma of the songs was gushingly playful despite some equipment problems. Three years and a new bass player later, and they bounce onto the Apollo stage grinning floppily to a crowd of youngsters for whom the Kooks are their first love; Naiive, She Moves In Her Own Way, Ooh La all setting off funbombs in the hearts of the crowd. Whether the new album, Konk, will ever have the same impact as that debut is uncertain, but those tracks capture a moment in the Kooks’ lives – as well as their audiences – when it really all was about snatching a kiss, secret trysts and fumbling for a shared moment. The ghosts are still there, and they smile.

Rounding off the trio of gigs was an astonishing performance by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. I’m not great at sitting down in concerts cause I fidget, rock backwards and forwards, pick my nose and generally get a bit antsy, but it’s also undeniable that when the Apollo is seated it takes on yet another guise. Whereas The Kooks had been all gumtree gumption and snogging in the back row and Björk had been a conduit for lightning love and magic, Plant and Krauss made the venue a breathtaking blend of intimacy and hefty wonderment. 

The crowd, mostly made up of ageing Zep fans and the Q-set, sat wide-eyed and excited, falling in love and out of their minds. The funny thing is that I’d never been mad on Zep themselves, or not got round to it yet – but hearing ‘When The Levee Breaks’ led by mandolin and violin rather than twin geetars was something unique and special. Plant could have probably made a fuckload of cash touring with Led Zeppelin this year, but it’s clear that he doesn’t need or want to. Krauss has won about a billion Grammy awards, and T-Bone Burnett popped up onstage to lead the band through a historical primer full of ghosts, a kind of folk/blues seminar for the uninitiated as well as a reaffirmation for the faithful. 

Two hours is a long time to sit still but this went in a blink; at the age of 58 and a few clicks, Plant seemed to have found something about him that radiated out into the venue. Not the voice, the echoes of the younger man or even, I venture, the songs. It was something more. Something a bit more soul-shaking than all that. The collaboration with Krauss and Burnett had been more than an old man’s folly, more than what you might call an auld rocker paying homage to his heroes. It was, in many ways, a man who’d realised that, even in the early days, this is both from where his muse originated and what had been there before him and would be there after he’d long gone. The start, and the end of a journey, in a sense; the man comes around.

The Manchester Apollo divested itself of its audience, cleaned up, yawned, and went back to sleep. Tomorrow another set of musicians would bring another set of emotions here. Playful, spiritual, gnarled or just damned noisy, it’s all part of the same game but to be in it you’ve got to get up off your arse and catch the breeze. 

The great thing about theatres is the suspension of disbelief demanded: once inside, anything goes, and to be open to that is perhaps to find things out about yourself that you didn’t expect or even want revealed.

And then to get stuck in a traffic jam on the way home.

I went to Spain and there was no music (2008)

From The Fly

It’s the drunk-conversation-favourite question: would you rather go blind, or deaf? Touch wood, it’s something that I hope never, ever transpires but in the past I’ve always thought that, well, all things considered, this is still a pretty damn amazingly beautiful world and every time I go and visit another part of it I find that there are new colours everywhere that I never even dreamed existed. 

It could be in the shade of the grass, prismed through dew at dawn by the river in Shrewsbury, the dancing blurry greeny-blue of the Northern Lights above Reykjavik; the pink of a new nipple; the wood and stools and moustachioed chubby Lithuanian butchers distorted by the glass and amber of a fresh-poured beer in a Vilnius bar; Bangor City losing 6-1 at home in the UEFA Cup. OK, perhaps not the last one quite so much but that was always my thinking: eyes rule. Not that the alternative is any more palatable as a result, but if you really had to…

It’s a bastard of a question, really, which is akin to the ‘hey lad, how much would you, ya know do Anne Widdicombe for’ type of conversation that always begins at £1 Million before someone does, as they say, ‘the math, dude’ and realises that even now 500 grand could well be enough to retire on if you weren’t stupid with it, then someone else chips in with the old ‘yeah but for ten minutes’ work £100k ain’t bad’ which subsequently quickly gets decimated into ‘if I was pissed I reckon £10k would be ok’ and before you know it someone – usually DD – is saying that if you paid for all his ale that night and a kebab on the way home he’d get stuck right in cos I bet she’s gagging after all them years and fuck it imagine what you could sell to the papers afterwards etc etc. 

Or perhaps it’s not like that at all, actually, but as they say in Spainland, que divertimento. 

And cause they say things like that and also have excellent tapas and lots of sun I’ve been there for a week or so on hols. The last time I was in Santander was in a vicious tour with the old band which involved, variously, sleeping in squats with pet iguanas, no water and rotting once-was-cauliflower on a stove through a hole in the wall, or running away from 80 irate Anarchists bent on kicking our stupid Welsh arses off, or hallucinating after no sleep, eight hours driving and nobody knowing what the twonk was going on cause a) it was in August and about 100 Degrees F and b) we kind of forgot to learn any Spanish. 

Anyway this time things are better and the beaches are lovely and there’s nobody trying to kick my head in for accidentally slagging off Negu Gorriak, who I would like to put on record are a very great band indeed. This time, there’s been other kinds of music; very little on telly aside from the (original) version of that crap Karaoke show on ITV on Saturday, the radio I bought is already fucked (after half a play of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ironically) and the only live music has been a funky jazz band in the fiesta over the weekend.

And even though I’ve ostensibly been on holiday, it’s bloody everywhere. Speakers in the plazas all night during said fiesta (also involving hundreds of wooden huts selling beer and tapas made from prawns, octopus, and other slithy toves) blasting out the latest hits, my own listening to stuff on youtube and myspaz, even having CDs sent in the post – music is inescapable. 

Its power, and passion, and ubiquity, and ability to express and induce shades of emotion I never thought I had, is something I don’t think, truly, that I could live without. No, I know so. I’d even listen to Toploader every day*, if it meant I could still keep discovering this magic. Although you’d have to give me 50 grand first. And buy me a kebab afterwards, to take away the taste.

*OK, maybe once a week. I’m not fucking mental.

The Spirit Lives (2008)

Originally published by The Fly

There’s a lot to be said for just standing onstage making a right old racket, amps up to 11 and eyes burning with belief as the sweat runs down the distended veins on your temple at the sheer damned visceral explosion inside. 

It’s how I spent a good couple of years in the old band, after all, scrapping around shoddy stages, smashing basses against faces and hammering out claw-fist rhythms in dust-clot basements with graffiti on the walls and piss dripping out from underneath scum-toilet doors.

It’s all well and dandy and a staple of the kind of primal therapy that underpins the motivation of the briny bastards at the bottom, scrabbling around in the purple-thorned undergrowth and revelling in the spirit as much as – more than – the music itself. The process is designed, or undertaken, to provide some kind of conduit to a power that’s hard to pin down but more powerful than anything else when it can be caught.

It is that self-same spirit of independent, alternative and slightly angsty gravel that underpins also a wider vision of music. It’s a spirit that runs through rock n roll music since day one; since Robert Johnson made his pact with devils unspoken at the crossroads, in truth, Johnson’s own muse having been borne on the horrors of the past itself. 

The same spirit and wariness of the establishment that catalysed rhythm and blues, that made Elvis Presley himself at one time a rebel, that fired up the Stones and The Who, that raked through the eyes and hearts of the Velvets, the Stooges, the Lost Boys: the spirit that powered punk rock, and any number of subsequent splinter factions since.

It’s the same spirit, too, that initially fired Jack White: you can hear it every time he explodes into sky-squeal; be it those pained, strained, excruciatingly beautifully fucked vocals or the craziness led by a guitar extortion, exhorting the instrument into greater, flame-filled, harridan-Hendrix flights of dastardly fancy. A sound-sourced grasp out of the darkness that bites and bristles at your neck, and your hair, and the pieces of clay within and it’s petrifying, in the best kind of way. In the White Stripes (if ever they’re going to play again) it is (or was) undeniable, Meg’s dum-dum drumming the simplest of tribal beats round which Jack could weave and tangle and gibber and fly, an instant fix of the primeval urge to blast back at the world in confusion or in joy.

In the slightly more conventional set-up of The Raconteurs his Icarus-soar is more controlled, counterpointed masterfully by Brendon Benson’s more fluid approach and the anchoring basslines beneath. Benson and White together is quite something, two virtuosos in tandem – the craftmaster and the wild-eyed visionary, and when the sparks fly, the venue lights up in astonishment. And when it comes together in something as magnificent as Blue Veins, you can start to understand Robert Johnson’s motivations in the first place.

It’s fair also to say that The Raconteurs would not countenance a gig in an underpowered, underlit, dangerously-wired shitehole. 

And nor should they, because the vibe of which we speak is not dependent on shouting at the spiders or useless, cheap excuses for amps. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, follow that if you just turn it up loud and scream the spirit will appear. And conversely it obviously doesn’t follow that buying a vintage Custom SG and a Marshall 900 will make you play like Angus Young either. We can all reel off lists of over-polished, boring-arsed bands who could do with spending a few gigs running away from irate cowboys, fending off the attentions of over-eager flobbers and generally getting their smooth sides roughed up a bit.

It’s an odd one to pin down, really, which is why the most interesting manifestation of The Spirit at the Liverpool date of The Raconteurs was rather a surprise. It was, of course, there in some of Jack’s more incriminating licks, but that wasn’t quite the whole story. The band played, the sound was sharp and gravelly, and the drapes behind the group shivered, shook and undulated. And I realised: it’s there. In the shadowplay behind the lights there were dancing sprites of pure rock n roll, enticed by the music and the audience and the dusty dressing room, but brought through the portal between netherworlds by all and none of these things.

A little bemused, I looked round the room and ended up quite by chance looking at the lighting engineer who was rocking backwards and forwards, ratty, long, resplendent locks shaking and whirring behind his nodding head. I could see the whites of his eyes but the pupils were enormous. He was possessed by it and as I smiled and watched his fingers flit over the lighting desk like Stevie Wonder plays the Rhodes I realised that the engineer was a conduit, too. His desk was his instrument, the lights the manifestation of the same primitive urge of expression that Lemmy has when he ‘sings’ and Future Of The Left flirt with gleefully.

 In one split second a cymbal crashed, Jack White’s craw blasted unearthliness, Benson’s guitar squealed and a strobe flared vicious vindication. A gasp emanated from somewhere, and I was surprised to find out it was my own.

Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge to turn and face the lighting desk. I shivered: the engineer was staring right at me and I felt, I knew, I was staring into the eyes of a lion. Intimidating, powerful, and proud, it was a gaze of challenge and timelessness, of a world where rather more immediate rules of life and/or death applied.

I stood, transfixed, caught in the beam. The blood drained from my face; my heart missed a beat. I felt insignificant, and infinite, and I understood everything was part of a bigger, never-ending tale that was never truly meant to be fully spoken of; that never could be expressed aside from only partly in the occasional instant of cymbal-crash, lights-flash, guitar-smash. Suddenly the venue was silent, and time was irrelevant, and the world fell asunder, itself in thrall.

Point duly made, the lighting engineer shook his head and his dreads clicked as he looked away, his fingers prowled back to the vista of his desk, the venue snapped back into sharp focus as the crowd’s roar seeped back into my consciousness - and the band played on.