hey tastemakers

My favourite album of 2005

The Organ - Grab that Gun (LP)

it's not out in the UK until 2006
so it gets two cracks at the end of year polls
cunning

I wrote this about it but it didn't get published

"The Organ are from Canada and they are a revelation. Katie Sketch has a fantastic voice. This lady can sing. Powerful, sexual, enigmatic and fragile; she is spilling her guts and I feel like I’m being punched in the heart. This record is burning out my hard drive and deconstruction is an insult. But we have to mention The Smiths – because the songs are that good and because guitarist Deb Cohen has picked up a torch with one hand and thrown down a gauntlet with the other. Some dickhead said "the female Interpol". Thanks dude. Thanks for reminding us that it's a male-dominated industry, but this isn't a posturing attempt to re-capture some coveted, early 80’s post-punk wilderness when melancholy was somehow more ‘authentic’. This is happening right now to these people, in these songs, and they are fantastic and they deserve to be fucking massive."

But what would I know.



Happy New Year

must remember to drink more paint next year

mood: can't complain, because they actually sewed my lips together

music: The Vibration Hot Chip

Financial Forecast






WATCH GRAVENHURST LIVE IN LONDON AT TISCALI

There's also an interview, but they cut out a crucial part. In response to the question 'is it strange being on Warp, an electronic label?' I said "Yes, it's deeply alienating. When I first came into the Warp office they made me stand on a table and everyone pointed at me. On St. George's Day everyone got a Mars Bar except for me, and it really affected my balance. I can no longer play chess".
__________________________________________________

I really hate Christmas. I'm a Transcendental Atheist Pagan Psychogeographer. I get my spiritual nourishment from the relationship between environment and psyche. Shopping districts at Christmas time are an incitement to religious hatred against my kind. What about me? What about my needs? I'm a religious minority. I'm going to blow myself and everyone else up unless we abolish those fucked up dwarf-santa things that jiggle their hips and sing when you walk past them in service stations, because they give me sexual nightmares.

_____________

Above: Pizza box found in Zurich. I claim my Pulitzer Prize



Here's some things I wrote this year for some magazines that decided not to run them.

What was the first record you ever bought?
Before I bought any records I was given “Bridge of Spies” by T’Pau, which I think is a record we can safely say does not deserve any critical re-appraisal. The first record I actually bought myself was “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys.

And where did you buy it?
I ‘bought’ it from the back seat of a Volvo Estate belonging to a guy down the road. He ‘moved on’ shortly afterwards.

Which musician have you ever wanted to be?
I never really wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a train driver, but I just couldn’t cope with the hardline Trotskyist agitators intent on jeopardising the trade union movement, so I signed to Warp instead. Did you know Dennis Nilsen was active in the trade union movement? He liked to have sex with dead men. I suppose all people have their flaws. We shouldn’t let deviant sexual pathology get in the way of the Great Cause. <>

What do you sing in the shower?
I don’t sing, I scream as the water alternates between extremes of hot and cold. I live in a caravan on a trading estate. When they Pump Up the Shit at the sewage works up the road the plumbing backs up. I hope I sell some records soon.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

There is no point listening to music on a Saturday night, because the social club down the road cranks out Rod Stewart till 3am. When there was a massive riot at a Group 4 prison in 1998 the only way they could restore order was by playing Rod Stewart at deafening levels. Within minutes the inmates were drinking paint, slurring their words and bumping into walls.


Desert island disc:
The thing people don’t seem to clock is that if you are trapped on a desert island you are probably going to die there. You will likely be preoccupied with trying to build a raft or kill and eat a goat than listen to a record. I think a good sound track to slaughtering and gutting an animal for the first time would be “Happy Talk” by Captain Sensible.

Bedtime reading:

Right now I’m reading Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World’. It confirms your worst fears: people are bloody stupid, politicians combine corruption with fashionable economic theories based on blind faith, and socialism is dead because credulous masses would rather consult crystal gazing charlatans than take control of their own lives. As soon as I hear the words “think global, act local” I find myself uprooting saplings and burning polystyrene for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Guilty pleasure:

I still feel pretty guilty about burning down my school when I was 13, but I can’t pretend it wasn’t a big buzz at the time.

Pet hate:

I hate pets. If we killed all the animals, vegetarianism wouldn’t even be an issue. Animal lovers need to look facts in the face: if we don’t kill animals, they will kill each other, and then the terrorists win, right?

_________________________________________________________________-

We made Gravenhurst t-shirts for the tour. Will sell some online at some point.

Circular black holes logo on sky blue

Sold all the masculine, Ernest Hemingway army green ones

They are £15. Expensive because they are American Apparel, which means they are made ethically in the USA, depriving developing countries of much needed manufacturing opportunities.

_________________________________________________________________________

Pictorial Minutes from the 14th Annual Symposium of Gravenhurst Taxidermists
Held at G5, Zurich, Switzerland
"This house believes that we still have much to learn from filling animals with sand"


Left: This is an example of the kind of decline in taxidermic values I am talking about. Sloppy, degenerate. These birds aren't even dead. They are just nailed down.


















Left: Good taxidermy. Elegant chandelier display. You don't even know it's there until you stand up quickly and a dead bird crawls into your mouth. It just wants to see what it's like in your mouth, that's all. It just wants to know what it's like being in your mouth.







Left : Relaxing with a new friend.

crackerjack rock attack

Mood: Screaming Fields of Sonic Love played at half speed on a dictaphone through Andy McNab's gook-spattered balaklava
Music: Low - Long Division

Full tour reports coming up when I fit my teeth back into my head. I took three books on tour with me: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers, and Bukowski's Ham On Rye, but I was too wired/drunk to deal with tiresome things like 'concepts' and 'ideas' and read the soul-stirringly homoerotic Bravo Two Zero. Fact: Andy McNab is a better witer than Ian McKewan, but not as good as Steven King, who isn't as good as Ian Sinclair, whose London Orbital I am now reading.

December 20th onwards: watch Gravenhurst's London show online:
TISCALI SHOWCASE

Includes audience of young girls clapping and wetting themselves on request. Also includes footage of Morning Runner, Coldplay's favourite new band. There's also an interview with me, if they decide to run it.