Somewhat depressing review of our Notts band show here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2004/09/29/entertainment_music_gigs_2004_09_juana_molina_gravenhurst_event_feature.shtml
"Many of the people I speak to afterwards who weren’t as keen said it was because they just didn’t like him."

We just couldn't hear anything and the people down the front were very sympathetic when I joked that they should all turn round and tell the people behind them to shut the fuck up. It doesn't matter when the monitoring is good but the PA was terrible (as the engineer fully admitted) and we couldn't hear ourselves sing; pretty hard to pitch the notes in that situation. Sonic Boom didn't mind though. He was well into it. Afterwards some bloke came up to me and said it was totally, totally amazing, and we chatted about bands for an hour. Turns out he saw Slint play at the show which does the bootleg rounds and can be found on peer-to-peer searches.
Then some other guy came up to me and the conversation went like this:

"Did you tell people to shut up earlier when you were playing?"
"Yes I did."
"That's really pretentious. If people like you they will be quiet, otherwise they won't."
"Maybe other people in the audience do like them though, and people should respect that they are paying money to be there. Oh, look, just go fuck yourself."

Sorry, I just couldn't help myself. He had that annoying way of talking where every sentence sounds like it is a question. When four of you drive across two-thirds of the country in a car laden with equipment, eat yet another £5 motorway service station sandwhich for dinner, sleep on someone's floor and get paid £50 to play to a room full of people who talk through not just the support but the main act as well, losing you a total of £2000 for a week of promotional shows, you kind of lose patience.

dead man's shoes

Went with Tone to see Dead Man's Shoes, the first feature-length picture from Warp Films. A slasher-revenge flick with social realism, humour and poignancy. No-one at Warp told me it was tailored completely to my tastes. And there is a Gravenhurst track on the soundtrack CD. It’s amazing to be even vaguely associated with a film that explosive and memorable. Transplanting the exploitation-revenge genre to the Midlands is subtly transgressive. It’s like a British High Plains Drifter.

Mark Kermode writes about it here:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1283147,00.html


Idea for a comic-strip, devised on tour whilst trying to think up the ten most smug, self-congratulatory bands ever...

"Leatherface Versus..."

(Pilot Issue )

J Kay is waxing his new porsche and generally chillin', hanging out in his Surrey mansion with buddy Jamie Oliver.
"Oi mate, stick on that new Skint Records compilation"
"Yeah, pucker"
"What the fuck is that sound?"
Leatherface runs out of the bushes and mows them down effortlessly with his chainsaw.

Next week: Leatherface versus Counting Crows

home

Home now. The european shows with Sufjan Stevens were superb. The audiences were sometimes scarily respectful. I was in the absurd position of being in Amsterdam and unable to buy pot, as I got to the coffee shops after 1am. Then the same thing happened in Utrecht. Determined to get stoned I went in the next day and smoked a joint before embarking on a plane ride. Ill advised, but out of a misplaced sense of duty, and craving a Proustian rush of the pot holiday I enjoyed there at 16. I spent the next hour in a state of general, low-level anxiety, checking that I hadn't lost my passport every two minutes and unable to accurately estimate the passage of time. I love the Netherlands. They don't make you feel embarrassed about being monolingual, drugs are tolerated and films are uncut, uncensored and really cheap. The only problem is that it is too flat and nearly underwater. Given the rising sea levels this could be problematic.