Hi.

A little piece of slight self promotion but an interesting blog anyway hopefully: here in Nottingham we often pontificate over a Sunday luncheon about how great it would be to curate ATP. After 4 years or so of waiting for someone to ask us we decided FUCK THIS and went ahead and booked our own version.

Nottingham recently has gone stale. The venues in the town are now all owned by the one corporation and it makes things weird. It’s good for some things but not for others. It got us down, we stopped doing gigs. But recently we became re-energised and the last few things we’ve done in the town (El Hombre, Christina Carter, Growing, Evens) have been successes for us. We got together and had a meeting with everyone who books shows independantly in the city and decided we wanted a festival.

We actively saught out more than we can chew.

So please take time to visit www.damnyou.co.uk for info about

DAMN YOU! KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS

Allow me a brief over-view. Its staged from Dec 4 -10 and basically sees a series of seriously eclectic bands playing venues you don’t usually go to, or that you might not have been to for a while. Each one has a door price as per normal but a £20 ticket is available for the week to save money.

So, without further delay

SATURDAY DEC 4

Record swap and bakesale in the afternoon followed by

SEACHANGE

BURNING MAN

ST JOAN

LAST OF THE REAL HARD MEN

SNEINTON GREENS MILL OLD SCHOOL HALL (off off the Sneinton Dale – map at the website)

SUNDAY DECEMBER 5

LIGHTNING BOLT

JOEYFAT

PRINTS

NOTTINGHAM BOAT CLUB, NXT TO THE FOREST GROUND

MONDAY DEC 6

SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN

BIRDS OF DELAY

+ one more

THE MAZE

TUESDAY DEC 7

TBC

WEDS DEC 8

JACKIE O MOTHERFUCKER

WOLVES! (OF GREECE)

SPIN SPIN THE DOGS

BAR NONE! (opposite the college, a few doors up from the Old Angel)

THURS DEC 9

DEAN ROBERTS

MODEL FIGHTER

plus more

BAR NONE!

FRIDAY DEC 10

HOOVER (yes, the Dischord band)

LORDS

BULLET UNION

THE MAZE

I take it all back.
“Summer of 69” by Bryan Adams is a walk in the fucking park compared to this

HOT CANCER.

It would be just about passable were it not for one moment. Allow me to take you through it.
The song is a male/female duet between two of the most annoyingly voiced people to have ever been allowed in a recording studio. This, again, is ignorable with some effort until the moment the female singer launches in, two footed, with this line:

“LET THEM SAY WE’RE CRAZY, WHAT DO THEY KNOW?”

But the pronunciation and style with which she executes this line shatters all known boundaries of aggravation. It’s more like this:

“LLLLEDDDDDDDDUMMMMZAYEWHURRRRRKURRRRRAAAAZZZZEEEEEEEEE”
I can’t do this justice. It goes beyond the aural and into a new realm where it touches all senses simultaneously. It is easier for me to compare the effect to less musical events. Example:

1. Soapy residue entering urine hole of penis.
2. Running barefoot through doorway and slicing 1mm of bottom of foot off on slightly raised metal carpet edging.
3. Taking a leather football full pelt in the face on a frosty day.
4. A pigeon flying beak first into your eyeball.

etc etc.

It is delivered in such a chintzy, Broadway Musical, American, stageschool, nightmare of a manner.

Phil Collins’ Easy Lover came on the radio afterwards and it was a simple and effective joy of a song after this had bummed my ears.

I would like to kill the female singer from this band by dropping all existing copies of Summer Of 69 by Bryan Adams, together with Bryan Adams himself, on to her in a metal crate from a height of 2 miles.

GOD HELP US

I went to London to see Scout Niblett open for Giant Sand at the beautiful Bush Hall. The beer cost a fortune and Scout played early but she floored me. She lived here in Nottingham for a while and up round these parts she seems to divide people’s opinion into polar opposites. An idiot that I know practically spits fire at her name. Seems to be mainly the ladies that have problems too. But jealousy is a green eyed monster and all that. Tonight John Parish formerly of PJ Harveys band plays drums on a couple of unrehearsed things, but its really just about Emma. The choice of songs is fairly dark and is centred around the noisy distorted guitar stuff she’s been doing more of and at times it’s really harsh and bare and a little uncomfortable. She plays the song about cheerleaders and when she gets to the part about wanting a cheerleader to “cheer me up, cheer me on” I was struck dumb by an urge to cry my guts out and had to hold my breath to make it pass and in doing so a large piece of snot squirted down my face. I think if you know anybody who dismisses Scout as a rip off of (for example) Cat Power then you should not be their friend anymore. They are reducing two people’s art to the lowest denominator – in this case tonal similarities and the fact they’re both women. See, Chan Marshall makes narratives and Scout plays with words until they’re the most simple statement they can be and thats why her songs knock you dead. This is the most minimal music there is, no words are wasted. It’s straight to the gut and whether she’s playing loud guitar or bashing the drums it still has the same effect because its always that sharp and that clear.

We are blessed!

Scout Niblett

Last Thursday night I broke my tooth on a single Pickled Onion Space Raider that I stole from a bands dressing room. It served me right. I then got involved in a conversation of positively cosmic proportions about the religious act of smoking weed. When I got back to my hosts house he put the first track of this album on. It is called “I Love You Too”.

On Saturday my friend made a hearty leek and potato soup. It was THICK. But it was tasty and nourishing. It was more than soup.

“I Love You Too” is like being totally monged, lying on your back and having gallons of this thick brew gently poured into your mouth and it slopping over your nostrils and eyes. In slow motion. But it has a riff that is so colossal that for me to climb to this level of WEIGHT I would have to strap a microwave to my ball bag for a week just to get my nuts to hang this low.

And then they kill you with “Babbling Flower” which steps it all up a gear in pace like the first track was your invite and now you are totally along for the ride.

Best bit about the Meadow is they are exactly as geeky as me. They dress in a manner that makes me look like Ian Astbury from the fucking Cult. But their riffs are just so grossly, sloppily sick. “Me and the Devil Blues” is so heavy its perverted and the guitar echoes like its being played standing on top of a mountain which I like to think it was.

They do that Zep thing too where they build the intensity up and then hit you with a quiet folky jam to just cool you down. Don’t be tempted to program these tunes out on the CD player as you will actually die if you listen to all the rockers on this record in one go.

And all their albums are this good.

This is the worst song ever recorded. Even worse than “Another Day In Paradise” by Phil Collins. In my temp job I listen to Classic Gold all day and they play this fucking shitrag every single day. Sometimes twice.

When the gravel-throated Canadian sings “I got my first real six string” I have taken to running at high speed into the toilets to conceal my utter embarassment on his behalf. Yesterday I returned a little early and heard the bit about the boys from the band trying “real hard” and I involuntarily began trying to remove my head with a plastic sandwich knife.

I hate this song more than war and if I ever met Bryan Adams I would kick his fucking arse for writing it.

I just wrote a huge amount about Peel and Blogger crashed. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.

I’ll try again.

You would never have caught Peel running into a bands dressing room after a gig and yelling

“I AM REBORN! THAT WAS LIKE TAKING YOUR FIRST E!”

I witnessed it.

Peels importance is not as a divining rod of talent, it’s as a symbol against the modern music industry. A pays B to make record. A pays C (who A and B do not know personally) to talk about how good Bs record is to D, E and F. D, E and F do not know C personally either but they trust their word.

Therefore if you run out of money somewhere between B and C you won’t get any radio play or press. The idea that someone who has been paid to talk about a record is more knowledgable that someone who just wants to talk about it is fucking absurd.

Peel being on Radio One was the finger to that idea. You could release your own record and send him it and he could well play it. Hell, he could ring you up while you’re at work and tell you how much he liked it. He also had an acute understanding of how much money a session fee actually represented to a band who worked full time and had little time or energy to spend making music. It represents tour money, money for another record release, money to pay your rent, studio money, equipment repair. I am sure I would have given up playing music ages ago were it not for the small but important cash (and confidence) injections afforded by Peel in the last few years.

I hope to God the BBC don’t see this as the opportunity to get rid of a program they have never understood. There’s a great team behind the Peel show right now who could take it over easily and it would be right, do not re-design, do not look for a celebrity replacement. But you know what’ll happen.

Here’s a picture from my 25th birthday with lots of people who contribute to Diskant in one way or another.

Nice one John.

Yes, it is just gone 9am and I am on the internet. A usual day at work you’d think but NO the fuckers monitored my internet usage and I got fired. Damn. Not even a lecture, just “Give me your pass, get out”. Been there 8 months too, such is the life of the temporary worker.

So, record labels, if you’ve been thinking of giving me a massive sack of money but have held off because you didn’t want to break my cozy life then NOW IS THE TIME. I WANT TO SELL OUT. RIGHT NOW.

Yesterday I got to play guitar for Damo Suzuki as part of his Network for the 2nd time at the Audioscope Festival in Oxford. I think this in itself sets up the day as being fairly weird but the day was just that. Weird. In post-gig-comedown-stroke-depression-at-going-back-to-work-coupled-with-boredom I thought I would write about what it was like.

When Damo recorded “Mother Sky” with Can I was minus 7 years old. Playing with him is a huge headfuck for that reason alone. The other colossal reason that doing this fries your brain is that it is totally spontaneous and unplanned. You literally get up there and play. Damo does this night in and night out as part of his “Never Ending Tour” where he goes around the world hooking up with groups of musicians to improvise with. When he booked his Nottingham show the promoter Anton got in touch and forwarded an email from Damo outlining what would be required by his band for the evening. I think it was along the lines of being “sound carriers” prepared to engage in “Metaphysical Transfer”. That Anton thought I would be the man to ask is something I am eternally grateful to him for.

So I got in touch with as many people as I thought would be into this that I knew and we ended up with Neil from Bilge Pump, Elvis from Twinkie on drums together with Phil, Neil and myself from Wolves Of Greece.

We went and had a get together the weekend before the Nottingham gig and just worked out what sounds we wanted to use but mainly we just jammed a bit and chatted. We couldn’t preplan anything because I think Damo would have sussed us out and tripped us up if he could so we just tried to have fun and get comfy.

The gig itself was nuts. I think we all individually freaked out at soundcheck and had to take some sort of huge breather to calm down. We had lots of equipment problems when we got there so we were quite fraught when we met Damo out of his cab from the station. Soundcheck was a combination of normal boring muso shit like “Is my amp sounding good?” and “Can I have some more drums?” coupled to “FUCKING HELL I’M PLAYING WITH DAMO SUZUKI FROM CAN. AND HE SOUNDS JUST LIKE DAMO SUZUKI“.

Like he wouldn’t…

The gig was twice as crazy. Damo had found a willing co-conspirator in Elvis and had managed to get most of us fairly well stoned beforehand so there was much giggling and good humour before we went on which I was really thankful for as I was shitting it. We’d been out watching the support band earlier and had been speaking to some of the older local music fans we know and they had no idea we were playing and were actually quite surprised to see us there as though Damo and Can were out of our listening league let alone our playing league. So I was fairly nervous that I was not worthy.

Damo asked us beforehand if we had any plans for starting. We didn’t. He told us

“I will jump. When I am in air: SILENCE. When I land: SOUND”.

Which we all immediately forgot.

And then it was over. We got signalled we had 5 minutes left and I was like “Shit, we’ve only played 30 minutes”. In fact we played 75.

People seemed to dig it. One internet commentator expressed an opinion that we weren’t local and were blatantly his backing band and had rehearsed it all. I take that as a compliment. I thought it was OK after playing but listening back to the bootleg that Ian Scanlon made I am pretty chuffed.

So we got signed up to Audioscope as well which was yesterday. A soundcheck at 12 o clock meant leaving Nottingham at 8am to go via breakfast at Elvis’ in Derby. We drove round Oxford for ages looking for the Cowley Road and the Zodiac and cursing about Oxford in general.

We finally got there and Damo was already there so it was a case of getting the gear in and almost immediately running through a quick check minus Neil on drums as he was getting the train later. It was all really cool and relaxed and we hung out blowing up Shelter balloons and getting reacquainted with Damo before heading for food and some guitar shop browsing with Damo in tow. Sonic Youth were on the TV in one shop and Elvis asked him if he dug the Youth to which he replied that Thurston is a good friend of his. Eeek.

We got back to the Zodiac in time to see Sunnyvale Noise Sub Element who were very, very loud. My personal taste in music means I always like human drummers but then again my personal taste in music means I like anything thats very, very loud so SVNSE were a good way to kick things off.

The atmosphere was cool all day and we spent most of the day milling about munching on nibbles and drinking body temperature Carlsberg Export and chatting to the other bands.

The room backstage was rammed all day with people and equipment. I think for the 5 of us it was just different to be headlining something and to have this kind of atmosphere. It was fun. We’re all used to rushing to gigs, playing first and getting drunk. This was like a weekend excursion to the country, plenty of food and loads of time to spare.

All the bands were cool, Vibracathedral Orchestra stood out and they seemed like awesome people too. Ditto for The Telescopes who finished their set by drilling through an amplified electric guitar.

We decided to go for a stroll and ended up on the roof of the Zodiac at one point, the 5 of us and Damo sitting in plastic school chairs, staring at the night sky while Elvis ran around drumming on anything that would make a sound. Until we got kicked off by security that is as the roof is unsafe. Could have been a serious way to make an entrance.

Oxes really got the place going, it seemed like they were the natural headliners in terms of being a draw for people. This just served to make me more nervous and I’d been drinking since about 12 and it was now 10pm and was also entering into the cosmic mindset by being mashed out of my brain causing me to walk round and round in circles with my guitar case working out what the hell I was doing instead of setting my equipment up.

When I got round to this I was freaked by people snapping pictures of my pedals and hollering at Damo.

He pulled a surprise on us and jumped in the air when no one was looking apart from the drummers so our big, tight entrance was a mess of us all coming in at different times which doesn’t bode well seeings thats the only planned part of the set.

I don’t remember much about it except it was LOUD. My ears are ringing still, we were much more ROCK than in Nottingham. Elvis and Neil cooked up some insane rhythms that just fucked with my head and left me, Phil and Neil just hoping we could make sense out of them. It was like some Afrobeat polyrhythm thing and it killed my brain at times where I almost lost my balance. That may have been the Carlsberg, mind.

We listened to Queens Of The Stone Age, Mudhoney and Soundgarden on the way up in the car and every time I tried to play something subtle and cool it just came out like some Stooges rock riff. In the end I went with it and Damo seemed to dig the volume as he really wailed.

I’m not sure if people had te patience to be into 45 mins of improvised rock after such a long day but it was fun for me.

And then, immediately the day stopped being fun for an hour at least. We got bundled out into the street with our gear as the Zodiac had a club night on. Then a van with 12 police people in it pulled up. About 8 of them got out and with no real effort to understand why we were parked on double yellows (I’d have said me carrying a huge amp was their clue and the venue we were parked outside maybe?) they began shouting at us to move. I tried to ask where Gareth (our long suffering driver) and Elvis where there going to move to (you know, so I could actually FIND them and get home) and was told to “SHUT UP” by one particularly prickish copper. It seems in Oxford they have such an over subscription of applicants to the police force that they can go out of their way to hand select the most evil, inconsiderate, retarded fuckwits to make the grade.

But it worked out, we went back to Simon and Stuarts and had some more drinks with Damo and Marceline who runs some webzine or another and our mate Brum who’d come up from London.

Got in at 4am. Am knackered.

Had to share that with you so thanks.

What I wanted to say most of all is that we all had our doubts about the idea of doing these 2 improvised gigs. Damo’s attitude is if we communicate then it is a success and the people playing can truly transcend the band environment if they let themselves. Sounds like total hippy nonsense but he’s completely right, it was such uplifting fun. I want to do it again!

Their singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain was murdered in 1994.