My god, this record is good. It’s so good. And check out the lady on the front, parked up outside a street of cheap 1950s London semis on a motorbike, wearing aviators, leather gloves, fluffy-sleeved parka and a crown. God this record is good. It echoes and booms like little else on my shelves* and I have no words to describe it, except that it comes from outside my frame of reference, it comes from my city, and it probably comes from the future, if there was such a thing. It’s this first track, Aktion Pak, that’s getting to me right now. It has a breadth and charge and a pace and a bizarre skewed structure that lifts it above the stuff I used to hear coming out of Chimes nightclub when I lived in E5. It’s got this weird strength and tautness and tightness above the muddiness of the bass and the delayed vocals. It’s like someone pinging a bit of razor wire as if it’s an elastic band, and aiming it right at your eye.

*shelves! Ah, shelves. So about a month ago now, I bought some heavy industrial shelves from a junk shop. Proper lab shelves, says my friend Mr Nite who fixes lifts. Alright! Part of my fantasy that actually I don’t live in a twee Victorian flat, I live in a huge factory space where I can have huge parties, tap dance, make huge music and ride my bike around the room, that’s what these shelves are. But. Heavy as fuck. Proper, proper heavy metal. The real shit. I had no idea until I tried to lift one. So they sat in the hallway while I thought about getting a boy round to help put them up but never got around to actually doing it. A couple of boys even offered, but I never took them up on it. Then yesterday I awoke in the most evil bastard of all moods.There’s only one thing you can do when you feel like that, and it’s DIY, pure and simple. I figured the pain of dropping one of these damn girders on my head would at least serve as a distraction from my mental, ummm, anguish. So I put on a DIY outfit of jeans, boots and white vest, trying to look a bit like Gina Gershon in ‘Bound’ but without the plumber’s kit. And I got to work. I had to balance things on my head. I had to balance things on chairs. I had to almost chop my hand off and do my back in and scrape the skin off one arm. I had to swear and listen to Chrome. I had to stop occasionally for tea and despair. But now my speakers are at head height and my CDs are all nicely displayed, and my god, I’m proud. My wife says, when you’re feeling down, action equals satisfaction. She means, DO SOMETHING. At all times. She is so right. I’ve even left her a special space for her CDs.
Just so no-one thinks they’re mine, y’understand.