Gravenhurst news

As I haven't posted anything for ages, I thought I'd paste in the latest Gravenhurst mail out, thus contravening my self-imposed regulation of keeping this blog independent of my day job (not taking my work home with me). New song lyrics aside, the mail out is the most creative thing I've written for a while so what the hell. Here we go.

Greetings people of refined taste and discerning proclivities. And hello to the dull, the indifferent and the moronically incurious. And the horrifyingly pointless. All are welcome here.

I am roughly half way through the creation of the next Gravenhurst album. I will however be taking a break from writing and recording in November because Paul Smith of Maximo Park has a solo album coming out and he has invited me to perform as the main the support act on his tour of Europe and the UK, and naturally I said ‘Fuck yeah’. So here are the dates.

Thursday 4 November, HOLLAND - Amsterdam, Sugar Factory

Friday 12 November, ITALY - Milan, La Casa 139

Saturday 13 November, ITALY - Rome, Blackout

Sunday 14 November, ITALY - Mirano (VE), Moon Club

Tuesday 16 November, SWITZERLAND - Luzern, Bar 59

Wednesday 17 November, SWITZERLAND - Fribourg, Café de la Fonderie

Friday 19 November, SWITZERLAND - Zurich, Plaza

Saturday 20 November, FRANCE - Paris, Fleche d'Or

Sunday 21 November, BELGIUM - Brussels, Botanique/Rotonde

Tuesday 23 November, UK - Southampton, Joiners

Wednesday 24 November, UK - Oxford, Jericho

Friday 26 November, UK - Nottingham, Bodega

Saturday 27 November, UK - Leeds, Brudenell

Sunday 28 November, UK - Birmingham, Glee Club

Monday 29 November, UK - Bristol, Thekla

Wednesday 1 December, UK - London, Bush Hall SOLD OUT

Thursday 2 December, UK - Manchester, Deaf Institute. SOLD OUT

Friday 3 December, UK - Glasgow, Classic Grand

Saturday 4 December, UK - Newcastle, Sage 2

I will be playing at least four new songs and several old ones, switching between electric and acoustic guitars as quickly as possible and trying to avoid wasting time repeatedly tuning up. I will as ever be accompanied by a number of drone-making electronic devices. I am assured by a reliable source that the Deaf Institute in Manchester is haunted and that three-part harmonies may be provided spontaneously by the resident revenants who are doomed to wander the eternal limbo between the realms of the living and the dead, unable to rest in peace until they find that fucking stereo mini jack to quarter inch patch lead that some cunt from the support band accidentally-on-purpose wandered off with after a gig that ended in disaster when part of the building collapsed, trapping the group of singers back stage for three days over the course of which they were driven insane by a monumentally pedantic sound engineer. By the time rescue workers reached them they had smeared the walls with their excrement and eaten their own eyes before finally strangling themselves to death with XLR cables. The sound engineer was found unharmed, lucid, and fervently espousing his position on the problem of phase cancellation in applications involving multiple microphone placements.

Hope to see you there.

Nick

ULTRASKULL IS BACK! 100%! NEW: MINI ISSUE THREE

Ladies and gentlemen, after a long period of mysterious absence, Ultraskull is back on the web, with a *new third installment*. The previous issues have been improved so the pages load faster and are a bit less crap. You can't polish a turd but you can stick a flag in it, and the Ultraskull avatar stands strong and proud against the forces of tyranny, fanaticism and etc
More importantly, the new issue, while on the slim side, and an inexcusable three or so years in the making, contains a new Spade Warrior strip, plus new characters Keith Harris and Orwell, Terry & Dune and more, presented by new Editor Mr. Skeleton, and Guest Contributor Master Rod. And naturally, now it's back up and running, Mr. Skeleton welcomes contributions for a fourth and hopefully much bigger edition. Please bear in mind that Ultraskull is PROBABLY NOT WORK SAFE.

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/ultraskull

Coming soon: an Ultraskull Facebook page...because everyone else does that.

In addition, the Silent Age Records site is back up. Though the label is on hiatus until I repress the Gravenhurst debut 'Internal Travels', for those already acquainted it may be worth checking out to find out what everyone who passed through the SA stables has gone on to do.

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk

Word.

signals on the wire/2151/ transmission one

signals on the wire/2151/ transmission one


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go outside for a fag. spiteful weather. raining cats and dogs. dogs and cats. cats, suspicious. dogs, don't understand. cats and dogs. pakis and wogs. pakis and wogs the taxi driver said, like my dad's mate frank used to say back in London in the eighties. not now. not round here. not in the centre of bristol. maybe on the inside but no-one's saying it. martin cabbied in Bangor for a bit after driving and managing the last tour. shit money; forty per cent to the company, the other sixty covers the hire of the cab, the diesel, the cleaning off the saturday night puke from the plastic seat covers, the windows and the sign that warns them about the fifty quid charge for puking on the plastic seat covers, the windows and the sign that warns them about the fifty quid you'll never get from them unless you call the police and spend the rest of the night wrestling over the fucking principle because you would have made more money if you'd cleaned it off yourself and carried on earning what's left of the sixty after rental, diesel, puke and casual racism from the cab office that isn't worth getting involved with but it costs you something to keep it on the inside, you just can't say how much it's worth but it's more than your job's worth to get involved. on a good night fourteen hours could take you home a hundred quid plus the tip- a bad penny thrown at the base of your spine creeping up to your neck sat down for fourteen hours, creeping up to your clenched teeth in the cab office on a break where someone's ranting at the news Enoch Powell said it! He said it fucking fifty years ago, rivers of blood, blood in the rivers, blood in your blood, blood in your clenched teeth in the cab office on a break where you don't break, you keep it on the inside, like you always do but it's chipping away at you, this bad penny tipped into the base of your spine, they build up these tips, creeping up to your neck creeping up to your clenched teeth in the cab office where someone's ranting at the news Enoch Powell said it! He said it fucking fifty years ago! Rivers of blood, blood in the streets, blood in your blood, their blood in your blood, their blood in your daughter's blood, poisoning the blood line, blood in your clenched teeth in the cab office where you finally break and punch the fucking racist cunt in his stupid fucking Welsh face.

but no martin didn't do that of course, he's older and wiser which basically means he's got his shit together, unlike me. and i wouldn't be cabbying in Bangor for as many reasons as there are rain drops caning down all around me as I smoke outside the flat that has been the most stable feature of my life for the last three years. the smoke is vile; I'm feeling it nowadays. Something changed when I turned thirty just like everyone tells you it does. It was a physical change; I had no mid-life crisis; there was no change in the profound chaos of my existence. fourteenth of may two thousand and fucked if I can remember was different only in that I reserved the bit by the fire at the Hillgrove pub in Kingsdown and I didn't have to pay for the drink.
--------------------

Listening:

Distance - My Demons
Distance - Repurcussions
Boxcutter - Oneiric
Boxcutter - Glyphic
The Bug - London Zoo
Steppa's Delight 2 (Comp)
Hatcha's Ten Tons Heavy Mix (Planet Mu) - VA
Excision's Darkside Dubstep Mix - VA
Ikonica's Vice Magazine mix - VA
Broadcast and the Focus Group investigate Witch cults of the Radio Age
9 Bach - 9 Bach
2562 - Unbalance
2562 - Aerial
Tang - Another Thousand Days Out oF This World
Recession Vol. 1 - VA Mixed by October - (Caravan Recordings)
emptyset - emptyset - (Caravan Recordings)
Techtonic Plates vols 1 & 2 - VA mixed by Pinch (Techtonic)
Warp 20 Chosen - VA
Warp 20 Recreated - VA (Warp Artists cover Warp Artists)*

*includes Gravenhurst cover of Broadcast's 'I Found The F'

Reading:

Tom McCarthy - Remainder

Just The Weight Of The Water

Blasting out Slowdive's 'Machine Gun' really fucking loud while on gruelling, unremitting hold to the National Insurance Contributions Helpline For The Self-Employed, I looked up the numerous and touchingly pollyannaish interpretations of the song's impenetrable, delay and flanger-soaked lyrics. I once interviewed Neil Halstead; he couldn't remember them. (I have now had the pleasure of playing shows with him; naturally, he still can't remember). I briefly met Rachel Goswell while interviewing Mr. Halstead; she couldn't remember. And if 'Machine Gun' is a challenge, try 'Souvlaki Space Station'. Slowdive are clearly very strong candidates for Band Holding The Most Unequal UK Music Press Villification To Enduring Fan-Adoration Ratio, awarding them a perversely righteous honour. They deserve more. Director Greg Araki is a massive fan; he has used their music on his films throughout two decades, from his underground days pioneering the New Queer Cinema to his mature work such as the astonishing 'Mysterious Skin'. The excellent Morr Music released 'Blue Skied an' Clear', an interpretative tribute album of Slowdive 'covers'. Writer and promoter Nat Cramp champions them; his Sonic Cathedral is subtitled 'The Night That Celebrates Itself', knowingly co-opting a tired old press criticism of the shoegazing 'scene'. And obviously, for what it's worth, I love them too. Slowdive were treated so unfairly and viciously by the UK music press that it hurts. But the young generation of fans have grown up and are settling old scores on the band's behalf. And we will win you know.

RIP Gordon Burn January 16, 1948 - July 17, 2009

The finest living English writer is now among the dead, which ups the competition considerably. Somehow I only just found out.

He rendered true crime as fiction; his novels read like brilliant reportage. His work trounced any easy distinctions between the real and the imagined. Google for obits. They mostly read the same, paragraphs quickly garnered from his publisher's press release. His work: fiction -start with 'Alma Cogan'; true crime - if you can go there- 'Happy Like Murderers', his startling account of Fred and Rosemary West. His sport writing- 'Pocket Money' and 'Best and Edwards' got me interested in Snooker and Football respectively; I previously had no interest in sport. I only read them because they were the work of England's finest living writer.

____________

This blog has been neglected because I've managed to scrape together some, largely pseudonymous, paid writing work. The Police Diver: Commercial Division. Once I have established a rhythm the Notebook will return to form, I promise.

Listen to me, Butterfly

Here's a piece for Venue magazine, previewing a Handsome Family show at the Bath Fringe Festival on May 28th.

"Listen to me, Butterfly. There's only so much wine you can drink in one life and it will never be enough to save you from the bottom of your glass.."
That’s a Handsome Family lyric from their 2000 album “In The Air”. It’s enough to make any fellow song writer wonder whether there is any point bothering. The succinct wisdom and effortless romance makes me feel like banging my head repeatedly into the table top and cracking open a bottle of red. The Handsome Family are Albuquerque-based husband and wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks. She writes the words, he writes the music, and with her peerless lyrical gifts and his staggering ability to sing four part harmonies over several scales one can be forgiven for thinking they really are an extended family. Like the Carter Family, or something. Or even earlier. Before anything was recorded. When songs evolved and existed only for themselves. In the old days, when Folk music was replete with depressing lyrics about famine, suicide and murder. The duo’s early single “Arlene” was banned from the radio for that very reason. As ever, our self-appointed moral guardians are ignorant of their own history.

The Handsome Family's All Music Guide entry reads like someone grasping at straws in a monstrous stack of needles. “Neo-traditional alternative country-folk” it says. This absurd fixation with genres is the recondite preserve of the journalist and is rarely shared by your average, sane music lover. Normal people just file their albums A to Z or not at all. Couldn’t it be that so many hyphens in a description be the sign of something, dare we say it, original? But there is something to the “Neo-traditional” bit. The Handsome Family sound like they missed out the last century, and arrived straight from the American Gothic. That’s where sallow, grizzled pitchfork-wielding farmers stare glassy-eyed into the lens bearing the silent burden of countless cot deaths, failed harvests and a fire and brimstone God who hates everyone’s guts. A picture which, in the graceful and supremely talented hands of the Sparks, is rendered both darkly sublime and very funny.

Venue - Bristol and Bath's weekly magazine
The Big Gig Feature
Issue number V869
www.venue.co.uk

______________________________________


Magazine publishing is an industry that is quickly affected by economic downturns. The perception of magazines as luxury items may lead people to stop buying them, but more crucially, reliance on advertising revenue means they suffer the knock-on effect of other concerns tightening the purse strings or folding altogether. Sadly, Plan B magazine is no longer with us. Each month, hundreds of left-field artists will get even less coverage than they already do. Plan B was a magazine you could buy in a regular newsagent and read passionate articles about bands you would otherwise have never heard of. "Why I Hate Rock 'n' Roll', reprinted here not long ago, was commissioned by Louis, the editor of Plan B, and I consider it to be my best piece of writing.

At least we still have John Doran's the Quietus.

Bi-Frontal Stereotactic Sub-Caudate Trachtotomy And The Infinite Sadness

Here's a piece I wrote for the February issue of Plan B magazine.

"If All Goes Wrong" - Smashing Pumpkins Documentary and Concert DVD

"I want my band back. I want my dreams back" said Billy Corgan, on his decision to reform Smashing Pumpkins, and booked a nine night residency at a small venue in Asheville, North Carolina. "I don't know if he picked Asheville or Asheville picked him, because Billy's all about chance" gushes his personal assistant, and I almost spit a mouthful of rum at the screen. If Corgan is 'about' anything at all, it is contrivance; a meticulously planned career, micro-managed down to the finest detail and executed with despotic narcissism. Teutonic blonde on bass - nice, check. Japanese-looking dude -very cool, check. And in order to make records, Jimmy Chamberlain, one of the finest drummers of his era. Corgan recently stated that "97%" of the recordings were the work of him and Chamberlain, confirming what everyone already knew- that the other two were mainly there for show. Corgan's finest song, 'Rhinoceros', appeared on the debut album 'Gish', and such purity of emotion would never be heard again. 'Gish' was overshadowed by Nirvana's 'Nevermind', and there was no way Corgan was about to let that happen again. From 'Siamese Dream' onwards, Corgan's arguable songwriting skills were smothered by desperate egomania. And so in 2007, Corgan sits in his hotel room writing songs in a white dressing gown that makes him look like a lobotomised mental patient. Each night he plays yesterday's new song to the fans. In a scene so jaw-droppingly onanistic it is difficult to accurately describe, Corgan stands out on a balcony strumming his guitar, and a fan arrives with the gift of a plaster model of Corgan's head. Her friend died, and she found her body, and the only thing that pulled her through was the fact that Smashing Pumpkins were reforming. And then she made a replica of Corgan's head. And then she gave it to him. "It helped centre you, yeah, yeah" says Corgan, struggling to pay attention. Corgan meeting the fans -check. Back at the hotel, he writes a song about Nazi Germany, and bitches on about the pressure to play audience favourites, instead of putting them through a punishing three hour set of new material. "Why won't you play songs like 'Soma' anymore?". "Why do you ask?" Corgan spits back, recalling the natural grace with which he dismissed former bassist D'arcy Wretsky as a "mean-spirited drug addict" and blamed guitarist James Iha for the breakup of Smashing Pumpkins. Considering Jimmy Chamberlain's heroin addiction, sacking, rehabilitation and rejoining of the band, one might think Corgan would steer away from pathetic slurs regarding drug abuse. Never mind the fact that spending more than a few moments in the company of this man would have most normal people pulling their kitchen and bathroom to pieces for something to inject. Corgan then admits that he won't play 'Soma' or 'Mayonnaise' any more because they are songs he "identifies strongly with James". Basking in wealth and success, he cannot cope with the fact that Iha got a songwriting credit for some of the chord structures. "But I wrote the songs" he pleads. 'Zero', a single from the painfully constipated double album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' contains a moment of truth. Propelled by an undeniably muscular guitar riff, Corgan sings "God is empty/just like me". Checkmate.

Why I Hate Rock 'n' Roll

I have been writing the odd piece for the excellent Plan B Magazine. In the next issue I shoot a very bloated fish in a very small barrel by reviewing a hateful Smashing Pumpkins documentary. Here's a more focused piece from last year.

Why I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll.

A few years ago my band played a gig at a venue in Nottingham. After loading in we were shown the ‘dressing room’. It was effectively a toilet cubicle without a toilet. It smelt like a crime scene. Suspicious yellow liquid dripped from a split pipe. The walls were richly spattered with the usual territorial pissings of long-gone or long-dead bands. Triumphant notches in bed posts or the chalk slashes of convicts marking their time, the real sentiments behind the symbols were unclear. But with the charm of a second-hand butt plug, the venue manager chuckled to himself that this was all “Rock ‘n’ Roll”.

And then everything clicked into place. I understood. Jaded promoters, parasitical booking agents, decaying P.A. systems, toxic dressing rooms, non-existent riders, imaginary contracts, indifferent sound engineers and the continuing existence of the flyer-deal: Rock ‘n’ Roll has nothing to do with music. Rock ‘n’ Roll is a masquerade that is used to justify and sustain a deep-rooted culture of complacency, cynicism and ineptitude.

In a classic example of the British habit of celebrating all the very worst things about our country, we call a certain network of small venues around the UK the ‘Toilet Circuit’. Touring it is akin to a homoerotic frat-boy hazing ritual, but instead of ending up with a tattoo of your mother's face on your balls, you accrue masses of debt and lose a couple of band members to madness and suicide.

Like the street cleaner who loathes but depends upon litter for his job, Toilet Venues need you but would really prefer it if you just didn’t exist. You will earn your stripes, you will pay for the privilege and you will promptly fuck off so they can put on a club night after your set.

Every node in the Rock ‘n’ Roll paradigm is self-perpetuating. Take the example of performance fees. Most bands assume they won’t be paid, so they don’t ask for anything. Promoters know this, so they don’t offer them anything. As a result, most bands don’t get paid. Booking agents are supposed to remedy this, but even ‘signed’ bands can have difficulty getting a booking agent. Agents can wheedle money out of people, but they can also neglect to tell you about a long-since cancelled show and leave you stranded and penniless in Saint Malo, lie till they are blue in the face and flatly refuse to remunerate you for their massive administrative error. This then becomes An Hilarious Rock ‘n’ Roll Anecdote, a well-worn propaganda tool that plays a crucial role in sustaining Rock ‘n’ Roll’s image of romance and roguish credibility. Agents can be useful in securing you support slots. Support fees are a standard £50, but no-one actually knows why. Ask anyone why it is standard, and in the fantastically circular logic of all ignoble traditions, they’ll tell you that it just is. But whose standard is it? Ah. I see. Of course. It is Rock ‘n’ Roll’s standard.

Rock ‘n’ Roll says that I am an indie bed-wetter spoilt by fancy jaunts to government-subsidised civic art spaces in poncey Benelux. Whatever. Superb commercial UK venues like The Luminaire in Kilburn are the exceptions that prove the rule: You Are Still Getting Fucked. Old toilets will survive as long as people continue to shit in them. Masochistic musicians will continue to get bogwashed into thinking they are stoics. The enemy hides in plain sight. It calls itself Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Today (unedited)

Today I was forced to cancel a show in Sheffield due to a chest infection, not unlike the one I contracted last December, and the year before that. On the way back from the chemist I walked back along Ashley Road and turned onto Brook Road, where I saw a car hurtling towards me, at sixty to seventy miles per hour, completely out of control, a grinning child at the wheel, having the time of his life. Brook Road is very narrow, with only enough space for one car, so motorists tend to use it as a stretch in which to test their acceleration and breaking speeds. This child in a metal box, out of control, barelt tall enough to see over the wheel, zig-zagging from pavement to pavement, did not give me enough time to drop my bag and jump onto a wall. I don't think like that. I'm a human being; a rabbit in the headlinghts. But he gave me enough time to see his grinning idiot face. He was having a wail of a time as the car brushed past my left leg, continued for perhaps two more seconds to the T-junction with Ashley Road, where he crashed the stolen vehicle squarely into a passing car. Within moments the still-grinning child jumped out of the car and ran away. I'm no athlete. I wasn't capable of making a citizen's arrest. He disappeared. I phoned the police. I noticed another man doing the same. Recognised him, local bloke. Mad Mike. Crowds of onlookers circled the two smashed cars. I hung around long enough for the police to arrive. The owner of the stolen car turned up."That's my car!" he said repeatedly, bewildered. He had been car-jacked. Two black youths had bundled him out at traffic lights and taken his motor for a ride. For some reason, only one was in the car by the time it hurtled past me and into someone else. The driver of the other car was in shock but not seriously injured. I stood around long enough for the police to turn up so I could give them my details if they wished to question me later. I gave them my name in phonetic alphabet too quickly for them to get it. "Sorry, mate, it's your accent" the Bristolian policeman said. Tango alpha lima bravo oscar tango, I repeated. "Sorry", I replied, "Estuary English". Phonetic alphabet is the only worthwhile thing I took away from working in call centres, and in Bristol it was rendered useless, with my glottal stops and Thames Valley drawl. I left.

I nearly died today, by about two inches. The car brushed past my leg. I could have been grafitti on the wall on Brook Road. Real St. Paul's grafitti, representing the real St. Paul's. Not a cultural melting pot with a yearly festival of drums and juggling and bass bins and Carribean food, but a very poor and undernourished shit hole where fatherless fifteen year old kids car jack and kill people on joy rides.

My friend Jess said this may be a sign. If I had a watch i would have looked at it repeatedly, waiting for significance. I found none in the skies, nor on my phone. I went home, bought beer and watched Pan's Labrynth, for the third time. Today I nearly died. But I didn't. A few inches of random spacetime spared me. "I'll kill the little bastard" said Mike, a local I've known on and off over the years, a Montpelier figure. Mad Mike. Good bloke Mad Mike. He saw all of it. He was controlling the crowd, he was in his element. I left it to him, went home, I looked at my wrist, my still-functioning wrist where a watch will never be, because watches don't suit me, but I am still waiting for a sign. I am still alive. I'm not a victim of the Parish of St. Paul. What else do I want.

I hope they catch the little bastard. That's what I want.

Sloppy Thinking Day

Max Webertron has just informed me that Saturday November 29th is "Buy Nothing Day"

"Saturday November 29h 2008 is Buy Nothing Day, It's a day where you challenge yourself to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from consumerism and live without shopping. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending! Buy Nothing Day is the biggest 24-hour moratorium against consumerism. People around the world will make a pact to take a break from shopping as a personal experiment or public statement and the best thing is - IT'S FREE!!!"

Right on! Punish an already wheelchair-bound economy and put more people out of work! Great job! This is the smug face of the ideologically decadent, economically and historically ignorant gentrification of the Left. They should try selling this shit to the coal miners in the 70's who couldn't afford to buy their kids a half-decent Christmas present.

We can quite comfortably leave buying nothing to the billions of people suffering in abject poverty the world over, thanks.

Anyone with some spare cash should spend it to help poor working families keep their jobs. This, 'Buy Nothing Day" people, is real 21st Century Socialism in action. Every Middle Class Lefty should put their money where their mouth is.

I personally know a few families who would benefit greatly from other people splashing out, not on them, but on themselves. If you are not too badly off, spend a bit at Christmas, help the retailers stay afloat and help people keep their jobs. There has never been an easier and more personally rewarding way to help the poor! All you have to do is buy yourselves stuff.

I am quite serious. These kind of simplistic 'Anti-Capitalist' ideas come from people who have never considered the other side of the argument because they don't know what that argument is. They don't know what Capitalism is. You could never accuse Marx of not knowing his enemy. Capitalists learned plenty from his acute analysis.

The best thing these 'anti-capitalists' can do is go back to the classroom, read Marx, read Weber's 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', familiarise themselves with the basic tenets of Keynesian and Monetarist theory, read up on the history of the labour movement, which in the UK was born not of Communist theory but of the workforce of the industrial revolution taking it upon themselves, through solidarity, strong leadership (sorry Anarchists) and force of numbers, to get a better deal. Anti-capitalists need to understand the history of peasant's revolts, the Diggers, worker's co-operatives, trade unionism and the importance of visionary philanthropists and Christian groups such as the Fabian Society in sermonising the moral necessity of of non-revolutionary, non-violent social reform.

Then, when they've all done their homework to a reasonable standard they can re-think their facile stance and see me after class.

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Wes, editor of Attack!!! magazine pointed "I usually buy nothing several days of the week." Same here. Didn't even think of that. Do these Anti-Capitalists harbour guilty secrets? Spiralling credit card debts and cupboards full of designer shoes they never wear? Doth the lady protest too much?