Everyone keeps sending me Flickr pics of their zombie costumes and Saturday night gore fests. I felt a bit left out, until I remembered that I’d sneaked into a locked cemetery this weekend, thus keeping my necro credentials intact. Phew. For a minute there I thought I’d mellowed out or something.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, October 31st, 2005
(5 Comments)

Ladyfest, dude! Best fucking gig I’ve been to in Brighton since…I honestly can’t remember when. Man it was so fun. man I was so tired. Man there were so many cool and disparate musical sounds, and noise, and chatter, and cake, and friends, and crazed Japanese duos leading everyone in a merry festive haze, and cool Olympia sorts, and respect, and banter, and walking, and spooky Kate Bush-style virtuosos, and manic improv, and laidback improv, and emotional French singers, and bouncing, and dervishes, and…

MAN OH MAN! I HAD A FUCKING BLAST!

Hearty congratulations to everyone involved. I’ll write more when my head isn’t swimming quite so.

Posted by Everett True on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
(8 Comments)

i’m being good have some live shows coming up, including an unusual amount of london shows… hot damn!
25/10 LONDON - LSE - w/ HEY COLOSSUS + SHIT AND SHINE
03/11 LONDON - vibe bar - w/ TRUMANS WATER
04/11 NOTTINGHAM - horn in hand - w/ TRUMANS WATER
05/11 LEEDS - brudenell social club - w/ TRUMANS WATER + BILGE PUMP
06/11 BRIGHTON - pavilion theatre with TRUMANS WATER + MELT BANANA
20/11 LONDON - the garage - w/ MELT BANANA

Posted by Andrew Clare on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
(3 Comments)

it sold already. get over it.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005
(No Comments)

Jandek was pale, in a black hat, just like I’d been led to believe. He brushed the open strings of his guitar hard and resigned so that they formed a constant, queasy drone behind his odd, semitonal picking; so that the effect was of a music with a different scale from ours - the weird displaced tuning of gamelan music,say, or the twanging of a shamisen. His voice was fuller than I expected, off-key and keening but with an undercurrent of age and experience that never faltered. His non-note notes swooped like crows, landing in a flurry of despair and muddied claws: “Leather tore…Spurrrrrrrrsssssss….bro-ken.”

He got up, unbending a thin body, rusty and elegant. He walked from his stage before the altar of St Giles (gold eagle, gold cherub, Exodus XX on the wall) and stooped behind a white partition. I expected him to come out the other side, but that must have been the backstage door, because I never saw him again after that.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005
(9 Comments)

Excuse my clumsiness; I forgot how to be a writer because I’ve been working too hard doing other things these last two weeks, and I’m not as young and able as I was to live two lives, write features on the bus, etc etc etc. You have a few years out of that, in freelance world, and once that spell is broken there’s no going back because you’re used to doing whatever it is you’re doing seriously and single-mindedly, so you spend a few weeks being an efficient project manager and getting up at 6.30am and you’re like, writing? what writing’s that, then? The only things you manage to get done being meditations upon the weird birch-flanked viaduct between Selhurst and South Norwood or somewhere, or a postcard to your mum or an email to your lover: small, hysterical or dreamy little things in your writerly Moleskine notebook, nothing with shape, style or substance, all first impression, bravado (caused by tiredness, lack of time and alienation from colleagues) and unsupportable hypotheses, bordered by To Do lists for commissioning Issue 9 surreptitiously whenever you get a second.

After a while you start to feel a bit dangerous, subterranean and lost (and grubby, like a grub, like something that’s going to turn into a sticky black fly any day now), and you get the new Liars single in the post and it’s dark like when you have to get up early, or when you go for a walk in the afternoon and forget it’s evening and suddenly there are pointy shadows on the street and a soft lead mist over the river and you shiver and walk fast and you plead with something that you can’t name to please let you have your words back and please make the day a bit longer.

I never knew, and still don’t know, if the Liars and their slight scariness was really scary, really itchy and jolty, or whether it just purported to be. But the singing bowl thing that rings and scrapes (a total surprise amid the oily beats and the sepulchral vocals) towards the end of the track - or is it the middle, there appear to be two sections - makes the track worthy of itself in a wholly inexplicable way; makes me put it on three times in a row. Everything else on there is wonderful too: murk with an understanding of how to pierce that murk with something so ragged and rust-edged that tetanus and paranoia are the only outcomes. Ouch. It’s so slight and it’s so sick. It’s out November 21.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, October 17th, 2005
(10 Comments)

Been wondering whether to go to Ladyfest in Brighton - Afrirampo, Vale Poher, Electrelane…Helen McCookerybook even. But I’m not a big fan of going places where I’m not welcome, plus there’s a baby at home who does want me. I figure I’ll just stay in.

Discovered the title of my Sonic Youth book via SY’s message board last night: Psychic Confusion. Hmm. Not sure about that at all. I’ll have to see whether I can convince my book company to change it. Any suggestions?

Also: first interview I ever conducted was with Young Marble Giants in 1980. I wasn’t writing for anyone, not even a fanzine - I just wanted to meet the band, as I was totally in love with them. So I phoned up Rough Trade and got to talk to them, face to face, same time as The Face. My article never appeared because… well, I didn’t write for anyone. Last night, I rediscovered the tape and - cringing mightily at the asinine, creepy-crawly fanboy questions I was asking - passed it along to Emily to transcribe and see if there’s anything worth using from it. I also discovered some black and white photographs I took at the session. (Not very good, but I do have the negatives.)

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
(12 Comments)

i’ve been trawing for gig guides, here’s one from a punk club.
they have such cool band names.
http://www2.odn.ne.jp/wall/510.html

today i’m going to see if i can find GANGSTA BARBER. it’s a combined gangster rap record shop and barber shop, as you would expect.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Thursday, October 6th, 2005
(4 Comments)

why i like 3-d pipes so much. it’s all about climbing frames, i really miss climbing frames. where’d they all go? i see them here in the parks and realise you don’t see them so much in england these days. what happened?
anway, so i’m gawping at 3-d pipes and thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if you could jump in there and climb all over that.
okay, i’m going out now.
a

Posted by Andrew Clare on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
(4 Comments)

for some reason i’m suddenly obsessed with the windows ‘3-d pipes’ screen saver. it’s beautiful. i could watch it for hours.
hm. maybe i should go out now.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
(No Comments)