.... Monkey Magic

2004-01-19T20:15:00.000Z

it was getting a bit drab and underpowered round here. Olive can do that to a boy...

well, displacement activity or not, i've moved here!

2003-11-24T02:25:00.000Z

i'm getting grief for never updating this damned thing, so in place of anything useful to say, i bought some new records on friday and perhaps i should just share my joy:

timeblind the rastabomba remixes
the bug feat wayne lonesome slew dem
keith hudson satan side
rhythm and sound with cornell campbell king in my empire
the two new shockout releases from Kid 606's label, one from DJ Rupture with Wayne Lonesome and i forget the other one !
gina x no gdm remixes (it's like my goth past is ok again!)
outkast hey ya! (single of the year?)
missy pass the dutch
primal scream some velvet morning (there's a good version on the b-side, trust me )
dub pistols six million ways to live (which is a lot better than you think it is, in a festival band genre-collision kind of way)

and some others. but i'm drunk..

2003-10-08T11:36:00.000Z

you'd have thought that now i have broadband at home, this blog would be crammed.

but i did my back in for my birthday so i've been mostly lying down. i'll get there, i promise (if only to make disparaging comments about john "silver machine" eden and his Hawkwind blog.

by the way, if anybody would like to hear the aforementioned 'Bela Lugosi's Dread' by Dubversion Meets The Batcave Uptown, it's now kicking around on soulseek and kazaa so go to it !

2003-09-03T19:31:00.000Z

10 days on the wagon.

it's crap.

can't sleep, don't feel any better.

whazza point?

by the way, Matt TWANBOC is now slagging off Gang Of Four's Entertainment.

this is beyond the pale and I may have to set the dogs on him.

2003-09-02T19:05:00.000Z

since Matt takes great pleasure in teasing us with interminable lists of all his new records, i'm going to do the same. my lists will be shorter and much, MUCH less credible. but i don't care!

whilst waiting for a bus in Brixton on Sunday morning, i somehow ended up in the Virgin store (never a place for stocking up on the latest Stock Hausen & Walkman 3" CD in a plywood sleeve) and ended up with this bizarre fucking selection:

The Rapture - House Of Jealous Lovers (hardly the most important record of the decade, as some would argue, but it's one of the two or three best tracks to emerge from whatever we're calling this post-punk retread at the moment)

The Soledad Brothers - Voice Of Treason

Bill Withers - Greatest Hits (trust me on this, it's great)

KRS1/Boogie Down Productions - A Retrospective

Breach - Connect (really fucking crunchy swedish hardcore on Burning Hearts Records)

Gene Clarke - No Other (reissued at last, bought it for Strength of Strings as much as anything, which the art students among you will remember This Mortal Coil covering)

Tiga - Hot In Herre. (utterly pointless cover. why did i believe the hype?)

do i need an excuse for any of that? well, there's the People's Republic Of Disco, we've got to keep folks happy.

erm...

2003-09-02T18:52:00.000Z

so the 'industrial music is pooh!' debate rages on, with Matt TWANBOC still taking a snook-cocking stance at the whole thing, and John Eden and Paul Meme mounting sound defences.

with reference to what Meme said:

".... I think the link from industrial to acid house is seminal, as much because of the crowd as the musicians. My memory is that much of the industrial scene formed part of initial audience for acid. "

i'd agree with that, and also i'd wonder how nobody seems (i may have missed it) to have mentioned Meat Beat Manifesto yet. certainly, my initial exposure to that end of dance music came from hearing stuff like Storm The Studio from my more industrialist friends, and then them playing me tunes like Egyptian Horn Track straight after. MBM ended up being very much an act of dimishing returns, but for me they were perhaps the most important collision - at least at that early stage - between dance and industry.

in fact thinking about it, Bournemouth seemed to miss out on acid and house entirely, at least from what I could see and all the people I knew who abandoned their goth/industrial tendencies initially and got into it were definitely those who'd previously been into MBM, Ministry and the like, and even Depeche Mode et al. very few seemed to come from the other, dancier end. but maybe that's because all my friends were po-faced wankers !

(but don't get me started or i'll veer off into my stock rant about how Pop Will Eat Itself invented breakbeat and they'd be taken a lot more seriously if only they'd taken themselves seriously. and trust me, we don't need that)

2003-09-02T18:46:00.000Z

yeh, yeh....

i've been busy, okay? should have more blogging time now since i appear to be on the wagon. one brush with alcohol poisoning is enough for me, for now at least, so i'm off EVERYTHING until my birthday in 3 weeks.

of course, this all started at Riddim!, and i blame that Eden fella.

or something

to be honest, i was a bit disappointed with Riddim! everybody else seemed happy - we had 50 or 60 people come, which is great for a first night which was also up against carnival and the Reading Festival and the usual August Bank Holiday flight from the capital - but i thought it just lacked atmosphere somehow.

but these things take time to build i guess, and hopefully some of our live acts/special guests should come through for subsequent ones. which is in no way to diminish what was a storming set from Eden and DJ Badly. as usual, i panicked a bit when nobody was dancing during my set and instead of keeping it to the nice pure 70s roots set i'd promised myself (and anybody else who'd listen) i veered into populism by the end, something I compounded by going back on the decks (by this point barely able to stand!) and spinning all the usual ska and digidub and bashment crowd-pleasers I always drop at times of stress.....

but all in all, it was a decent night and just makes me determined to make the next one even better. or something

2003-07-24T18:18:00.000Z

Heliophobia

People think I’m taking the piss when I talk about my fear of helicopters, or assume I’m just desperate to appear interesting or weird or deep.

Trust me, I’m not.

I guess ‘phobia’ might be overstating the case a little – I don’t collapse in a sweating, hive-covered heap when I see them. But they bother me, unsettle me, give me the creeps, make me anxious.

When I was a kid I found them slightly disturbing – they didn’t appear to abide by the kind of physical laws I was taking for granted – but not worrying really.

I suppose it started at Stonehenge. Tripping as the sun came out, being chased across fields by the best (i.e. most psychotic) that the combined constabularies of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and the Met could throw at us. It was bad enough that my then girlfriend had been caught beneath a scrum of panicking hippies as the police baton charged us, bad enough that I’d tried to fight my way back to her against the flow, seeing the barbed wire in her legs (she still bears the scars apparently).

But when they brought on the helicopters, when the windowpane acid was making things really twisted, that’s when I lost it. Running blind across the fields on the other side of the road from the stones, searchlights strafing us, a metallic, Robocop voice intoning the whole ’20 seconds to comply’ Silver Bullet routine. Then seeing a family – 2 parents, 2 kids, concerned Guardian reader types, not even hippies really – coming to the conclusion that this wasn’t their battle, they weren’t the people the police wanted and surely if they just stopped and stood still the police would realise that.

Then seeing the police – and I know it was the Met despite the fact they were all free of numbers and insignia, because you just don’t get this level of brutality in provincial forces – club all of them to the ground, kids and mother and father. I know we didn’t throw rocks at the police because there weren’t any to throw. Trust me, I looked. I wanted to see a policeman’s face erupt in blood the way that kid’s had.

All of this to a soundtrack of barked instructions from the helicopter and the constant thrum of the rotors.

Haven’t been able to handle helicopters since.

Started noticing the effortless menace they could add to any film – from Apocalypse Now to Capricorn One, from Thelma & Louise to Goodfellas – with the way they could appear from behind trees or cliffs, or hang malevolently in mid-air.

And then the demos – the CJB riot, Reclaim The Streets, all the greats – knowing that the helicopters were tracking us and identifying us and triangulating us, all the better to pen us in and break our skulls.

And the one ludicrous significant drug deal I ever tried to pull off – whilst on a paranoid coke comedown, looking like what I was - outside a Brixton pub, as a police helicopter (in truth probably hunting down another escapee from Brixton Prison) seemed to be circling nearer and nearer.

I bolted home, abandoned the deal, lost a month’s rent.

So no, not a phobia, and not truly debilitating.

But real and uneasy and enough to add some twin-rotored spice to some of my nightmares.

2003-07-23T13:57:00.000Z

blogworld is weird world

it's ceased to be a source of amazement just how many blogs there are using up bandwidth much better employed on much more worthwhile stuff like Joan Bakewell porn sites and 5 million word attacks on 'Why American Beauty was a fucking lie', for example. But since starting this blog, due as i've mentioned before to John Eden's blog i've found myself engrossed in what seems to be a fairly hermetically sealed subgroup of blogs, often riddled with arcane knowledge, impenetrable arguments, heated disagreements about matters of import to as many as 4 or 5 people and often protracted post-modern namecalling.

None of this, I hasten to add, is an insult. The ongoing debate about industrial music being fought between the three headed beast that is John Eden, Matt Molotov and Paul Meme (whoever he may be) is instructive, funny as fuck and veers from careful reasoning to thinly veiled abuse.

My relationship with industrial music and culture is a fairly slight one, I guess, so I’m definitely not going to get involved in the argument because I’d be way out my depth and because it seems to be coming to a close anyway. But while I do understand some of Matt’s concerns – the often rather infantile attempt at shock tactics for their own sake, some of the more suspect imagery and references – he does seem to be taking an absurdly absolutist, ‘black and white’ (literally) view of the whole thing, as John has pointed out:

“Coming back to the religion thing, I think the precise point that Matt was making was not that Whitehouse were “anti-religious’ (which I would take to mean a completely materialist, rationalist, atheistic worldview) but that they represented an “evil” form of spirituality – an inversion of the white light of xtianity.”

I think John is onto something (he really is going to start thinking I want to fuck him soon!) with his references (relating to Whitehouse, I think, who I have no time for at all incidentally) to the difference between ‘shocking’ and ‘disturbing’.

Having lived with someone heavily involved in the OTO and all the sword-waving, borderline fascist crap that entails, and I suppose being of a pretty sceptical, materialist bent, I’m curious about John’s background in TOPY et al*, and I’ve read around the subject (was a time when I couldn’t pick up a book, magazine or record sleeve without hitting the same esoteric wall, a line connecting John Dee, Stewart Home, Crowley, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, The KLF and the TOPYs) but it simultaneously fascinates me, perplexes me and ultimately leaves me feeling like I can’t be bothered to go the extra yard to explore something I suspect I’d probably find wholly empty.

In the same way, the importance of some of Coil’s music for gay sex magick or whatever is of little consequence to me, and I’ll stick to the more ‘musical’ (ahem) releases. But it would be stupid of me to deny that whatever the key players in this scene (if it even is a scene anymore) are into obviously informs and adds texture to the work they make – you absolutely cannot ignore the ideas behind it and just listen to the tunes (like you have to with late Van Morrison for example, and I’d have put an ‘ironic’ emoticon here if I knew how to post one!).

So maybe I’m being an industrial/chaos magic dilettante, another post-goth (and yes, there was a point where I would have to deny myself the ‘post’ get out clause, I’m afraid) geek looking for leftover cheap thrills from other people’s dirty work.

Or maybe – and I hope – it’s because extremism or experimentation can still give me a real hard-on. Not the relentless harder > faster > louder machismo/endurance tests of speedcore and gabba, because that’s just not extreme anymore. But I still seek out, time and money permitting, music which will give me the fucking creeps or challenge me the way Hamburger Lady did the first time I heard it

And Matt’s lumping together of ‘industrial’ music into some homogenised and loathsome whole is ridiculous. He knows as well as anyone that there’s a world of difference (in sound, intent, worth and sense) between Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, Merzbow and Coil, Neubaten and Whitehouse and he’s just being obtuse.

Anyway, I said I wasn’t getting involved so I’m going to shut the fuck up and look forward to RE:TG, as much as a curiosity as a cultural event.

* not for a minute intended to imply that the OTO and TOPY were about the same thing at all, save – from my very limited understanding – a belief in the importance of ritual etc.

2003-07-23T13:09:00.000Z

RIDDIM!

well, the below posts regarding my reggae-related self-doubt notwithstanding, i'm doing it all over again anyway.

inspired by a gap in the People's Republic of Disco schedule (which could become a permanent one if my meeting with my (ex?) partner tonight goes badly), i'm launching Riddim at the Windmill, helped by landlord, flatmate, reggae mainstay and lovable nutjob alex 'dj badly' holland.

i guess it's not a million miles away from the idea behind Dubhammer (but hey, that was my idea too, and don't let any fucker tell you otherwise! :) ) - in that we're planning to cover a lot of ground - roots, dub, digidub, ska, dancehall...

hopefully i'll manage to squeeze in some Bug records and some really clicky Euro stuff (Fenin, Rhythm & Sound and the like) amongst the more obvious tunes.

i have a few decent connections, and DJ Badly has scores, so we should be able to get some cool guests, Johnno and Neil from Zion Train both seem up for doing something and our friend at Westbury Music has promised to lend us any of her old stars who happen to be in from JA. and we're kicking off with John Eden, who judging by his Shake The Foundations mix should be storming, and cover a gap in mine and Badly's reggae knowledge - newer conscious stuff seems to pass me by, much as i like it.

and what is DAMN FUCKING SURE is that we'll be steering well clear of cod-rasta business, partly out of respect and partly out of disdain (i'll save that for another post!).

No lions, no HiM, no red gold n green and no fucking patois on the flyers *

in fact, i reckon there could be a big frog motif ("riddim") to make sure that nobody takes us seriously, ourselves included.

august 23rd, the windmill, 8-late, £3, if you must know!

* the use of the word 'riddim' avoids the patois pitfall, i reckon, because i believe it's used more broadly now and has a meaning that stands on its own merits and isn't just a crass co-option. or something. i'm sure matt molotov could write something far more erudite, but then he smells of pooh

2003-07-08T21:02:00.000Z

Long time no blogging - the last two or three weeks have seen the suicide of
a friend and a week at Glastonbury, both of which seemed to preoccupy me
unduly.

Marcus was one of those people that you never planned to run into but were
always glad if you did. Of COURSE part of what made him interesting and
charming and edgy was part of what killed him in the end, but my friendship
with him wasn't just some kind of vicarious deal. He was genuinely
interested and interesting and though weeks or occasionally even months
would pass without me running into him, I always knew I would see him
somewhere eventually. Somewhere unseemly and way past our bedtimes.

His death really fucking hurt, more than I could have imagined it would - I
know we can't measure grief out in handy units or anything but this was a
real kick in the head. The fact that it was two weeks before somebody found
him was just too fucking awful and ironic - not that it made any odds to
Marcus - and I suppose relates to the way most people seemed to connect with
him: happily but serendipitously. I guess he just fell through the gaps, and
the less said about Lambeth Council kicking him out of his still empty squat
in Rushcroft Road (where he was near his friends when he needed them) and
abandoning him to the arse end of Streatham, the better.

Couldn't go to the funeral. I've buried too many friends and I'm not sure I
can keep going through it.

As for GLASTONBURY, it was fun but it felt like an effort. I'm still picking
through the little I can remember to work out if it was just a bad set of
circumstances - being too fucking hot, wearing blister-raising footwear -
that made it hard work at time. Or if it - say it quietly - is because at
nearly 35 I'm just too fucking old for that kind of high-impact 'fun'.

Aside from the expense - and I could have taken a good fortnight's beach
holiday and come back with change - in a way I felt like I'd seen it all.
For years, I actually enjoyed the rather predictable aspects of it - knowing
where the candle-powered steamship stall would be, and who does the best
brandy coffee on site (Blue Moon Café, if you're interested). And I've
always enjoyed kidding myself that I'm less a punter and more involved than
that, be it by being on various guest passes or - this year - having a
spurious involvement in some DJ business.

Going with my flatmate - who truly is part of the furniture there, and knows
everybody - added to that, but somehow this year it didn't really gel for me
and I actually spent quite a lot of time staggering around by myself, quite
gently off my face but always looking for something more spectacular and
exciting than whatever it was I'd just abandoned. I guess the people I was
with - being stoners, for the most part - were quite happy just chilling and
chewing the fat - but my predilection for fast drugs and visual stimulation
made me restless for the most part.

As for highlights - the Flaming Lips played the gig I guess they were always
meant to do: overblown, celebratory, joyous, just the right side of cheese.
Aphex Twin in his DJ AFX guise proved he could still pull it off when he
could be bothered. I never even worked out where he was on the stage (if he
even bothered to show) but the set was beautiful, working it's way from
quite bucolic electronica to some really quite fucked up noise towards the
end, all interspersed with some assumedly deliberately naff techno samples.
I'd love to claim I remember any particular tunes. I'd be lying.

Zion Train played a blinder as ever. I can see why they're reviled by most
people, 'serious' reggae fans included. Although free of rasta indicators,
they instead fill the void with platitudes and meaningless positivity,
although Jonno is getting better and better as an MC. But in an environment
like Glastonbury (and as one of the last bands on, playing to a crowd who
really want it) Zion Train pull it off like no other - it's simplistic
hands-in-the-air technodub and it made me jump around like no man at my age
with my blisters should have done.

The Skatalites were cursed with an appalling sound mix and a tendency to
stray way too far into the 70s for their set - they were a good reggae band,
but they were a much better ska/rock steady band and that's why we were
there. And Jocelyn Brown didn't bring much to the party than slightly forced
enthusiasm.

Jazz Jamaica All Starsfared better, and overcame my fear of / disdain for
jazz by making sure that any solos were always balanced against a steady ska
backbeat. I don't have the energy to explain my feelings about jazz. Suffice
to say that something, ANYTHING to grab hold of - a steady drum pattern or
something - can ease the pain for me slightly. And in Ashley Slater they
have a great trombonist. And if I could be a great musical anything, I think
trombonist could be it.

I think one of the mistakes Glastonbury Festival is making (perhaps
inevitably and unavoidably and for commercial reasons) is to lose sight of
the way it used to book bands - according to a mood or time of day rather
than chart placings. Even if I were a Moby fan (and I'd welcome terminal
cancer into my house more warmly than a Moby record) I can't imagine he'd be
my choice to finish a festival. Ditto to some extent Radiohead, although I
guess they qualify as an 'event'. The era of Glastonbury always putting on
reggae bands on a Saturday afternoon, and a band like the Pogues early
evening when everyone isn't too drunk to dance, are clearly over. That said,
any caveats I have about the increasing (but still reasonable)
corporatisation of the festival are weighed against the realities of the
situation - Glastonbury couldn't survive without playing the game to some
extent, and I'd rather have it like this than not at all.

And for all those wilfully clueless fucks who stand in their tofu-powered
yurts in the Green Field lamenting the 'babylon' (spit!) down below the
railway tracks, I ask only this: do you really think you'd be there,
demonstrating your turnip carvings, if the kids down below - that you hold
in such lofty disregard - hadn't shelled out their £100+ to come and see
REM, eat burgers and wear dreadful hats? Their cash makes your smug little
hippy enclave viable. Without them, you'd be back in your suburb or
preaching to the converted at some dreadful Green Gathering or another. Man
cannot live by yoghurt alone!

2003-06-11T19:12:00.000Z

Bournemouth Whitey Vs Sound System Culture..
(Let’s Get Ready To Be Rumbled Mix)

Sound system culture – proper sound system culture, not two Nathan Barleys who have got themselves a residency at Bar Ironique in Shoreditch and figure that makes them a soundsystem – is something that people grow up in, immerse themselves in, live for.

Not only did I grow up in Bournemouth – the least irie town outside Ulan Bator, and the jury’s still out on that one – but I came to reggae late and my tastes are way too wide for me to specialise as much as I’d need to if I wanted to be taken seriously.

Which is why I feel like a fucking charlatan whenever I get a reggae gig. And it happens quite a lot. Why is a festival in Belgium FLYING me out and putting me up in a hotel so I can play some reggae for them? Don’t they know any PROPER reggae DJs?

I’m serious. This is how I really feel – would I lie to you? And I’m not fishing for compliments or reassurance either, cos there’s only me here!

I’m a dilettante, a sneak, a cuckoo in the nest. I mean, I love the stuff, but I don’t love it any more than any number of other people who have more records, more depth of knowledge and more skills than me. So were they busy that weekend or what?

Part of it is nepotism sure – I know people who know people. Zion Train ring my house, that sort of shit. And I know I’ve got some good fucking tunes. I even like to kid myself I have a style of sorts.

But I can’t shift the feeling that someone’s going to expose me as a fraud.

Used to run a reggae night at Brixton Windmill for a few months, it went well – the brief was that we’d cover the lot – start nice and dubby, step it up through some steppers and sufferah music, up the tempo into digidub and dancehall, finish with ska and rocksteady and some crowd-pleasing Zion Train festidub stompers.

I liked that, didn’t see it happen anywhere else, thought we had a good thing, and so did the people who came. I was proud - not in a self-congratulatory way, but in that faintly naff and often implausible 'giving something back' way. but that was ok - it was on my terms and to be honest the audience weren't usually hardcore dubheads and the like...

But when it came to getting gigs outside the confines of my own night, I just dried up. If someone asked me and I knew them, I’d do it. But I’d never push for it, never offer my services. Why not? Selectah Y and DJ Z would be much better, get them to do it…

And this isn’t – I hope. I really fucking hope! – predicated on some hang-up about authenticity, about blackness, about rasta. Fuck all that. I just feel like I show up with a bag of records that everybody else has got and play them clumsily. How do I get to a point where I can enjoy that as a process?

Anyway, I’m playing backstage at Glastonbury this year and you’re not. Fuck it, at least I’ll get some free beer.

Meanwhile, thanks to Matt at that blog which is a very long acronym I keep forgetting for posting an mp3 of Sex, Boots & Dread, a reggae pastiche on an old Tappa Zukie rhythm (I can’t even bring myself to type riddim!) that I’ve had on tape for nearly 20 years and could never trace.
?“east west north and south, me tek it up me arse and me tek it in me mouth” indeed.

Who’d have thought it was Keith Allen

If the coke addled fucker is hanging around the dance backstage area when I’m on I’ll play the tune just to alarm him.

Next week: Dubversion stops whining when he realises that Whitney was right, and that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.

meanwhile, remember: it's better to die on your feet than live in Neasden.

2003-06-02T18:45:00.000Z

well that cocked up fine style, didn't it? why didn't the links work?

ah well - if you cared, the link for john eden's blog was and the link for urban 75's bulletin board was

is it just me, or is goth / 'goff' actually coming back, by the way? i mean, nu metallers are just goths with more extreme piercings, but that evanescence tune really is All About Eve welded onto a dreadful Linkin Park tune, and as for those ads for 'The Dark Side Of The Eighties' - sweet jesus, nooooo!

2003-06-02T18:37:00.000Z

people are always telling me i should write, i always wanted to make a living that way. but i genuinely don't feel like i have anything worthwhile to say. i can slag things off, snipe from the sidelines, but i'm rarely willing (or able) to stick my neck out and actually assert anything, nail my colours to any particular mast.

i mean, my inspiration for finally setting up a Blog was reading john's at and matt's one at hollow earth - funny, informative, querolous, well informed.

but then, ironically enough, these same blogs that inspired me have also crippled my confidence about writing anything - nauseating levels of erudition and clarity of thought on display have fair taken the wind out of my sails. so what do i do? just go back to and start another argument?

2003-06-01T12:20:00.000Z

so today is the 10th anniversary of my dad dying, and as usual i feel pretty numb about it.

i'd like to pretend it's because i have my grief or whatever under control and can dip into it in some way. in truth, it's just because it's so uncontrolled that it only sticks its head above the fucking parapets when i'm particularly drunk or low anyway.
which is nice.

i did think about going to my hometown to meet my sister and visit the viewpoint where we scatted his ashes, but some little ratfaced boys have nicked the tree we planted and im reliably informed that there is now a little bin in its place.

although the potential humour in standing in remembrance round a bin does have a certain dark appeal, i decided to pass.

... and so it goes.

2003-05-31T13:23:00.000Z

well, the SECRET PROJECT is pretty much finished... me and a much more musically accomplished cohort have finished work on Bela Lugosi's Dread, a digi-dub steppers style reworking of the Bauhaus tune....
the whole thing started out as a bad pun but somehow - mainly due to the talents of said cohort - it's actually a pretty serviceable reggae tune. we're not sure if we're going to press any up (my ego says 'yes', my wallet says no) but if not, i think we're going to try and get it hosted somewhere as an mp3 at least ... watch this space..

oh, and for reasons that will only make sense to goths, we're calling ourselves dubversion meets the batcave uptown

we're even thinking about making some 'proper' reggae, emerging from behind the comedy veneer, but to be honest i have the musical skills of an ashtray so i dunno...

2003-05-31T11:32:00.000Z

i have absolutely no justification for setting up a blog save that everybody else has got one, it seems, and perhaps it will make my working life a little less dull.

respect to John Eden for his uncarved blog, which is probably the only one i've read that didn't bore the arse off me....

.... as you were....