We'd like to insist that you complete this voluntary questionnaire.

We thank you for your involvement thus far.

To complete your submission, please answer the following multiple choice questions. There are no correct answers. This does not mean that all/any answers are acceptable. Please hand your completed application to the blank page at the front of the test after you have left the room.

1) You are...?

1. Tired.
2. Out of ideas.
3. Uncomfortable, but obliged to exist and act.
4. Seryn.

2) After one week on the road supporting the excellent James Vincent Mcmorrow, you fear that your band (and crew) consisting of six ragged men has garnered a reputation for...?

1. Sharp wit, style, and debonair elegance.
2. Farting, juvenile humour, and the scent of used, hot leatherette chairs.
3. Over-complication, obscurantism, and ironic maxilexicographicality.
4. Seryn.

3) The gigs were...?

1. Really nice. We appreciate everyone who came to watch us and who made a lot of noise. We also appreciate the whole JVM crew, and everybody who had us to stay or helped us out along the way with beer or advice or lifting things or all of it.
2. Awful. The stages were made of wafer and the crack-cocaine was sub-par at both best and worst and at average times of which there were few, which makes little sense.
3. What gigs?
4. Huh Oh man, I...I can't even remember. I was, like... oh, man – the lights were. You know, like, when you look at the sky, and you look at the clouds and...and with the contrast you're just like, 'Oh, man. Those are real clouds.', and you can see like the contours and everything and it's like...that's water? That's, like, a real sky, man. It's fucking amazing. Hey, man, you hear about Earth? He's with Honeyblossom, now. Yeah, they met in Peru when she was over there protesting against her Dad's oil company. Yeah, she's flying back today. Did you say you were making tea, man? We need milk. And tea. Yeah, there's a pop-up grow-your-own tea-leaf place just outside Waitrose.

4) There is...?

1. No way out of this, now.

5) In Copenhagen, we...?

1. ...were accosted outside of the venue, straight after parking the van, by a group of very nice people looking for our autograph. They approached the bus holding pictures of us and looking especially for Jeb. I hope they are reading this so I can let them know that Jeb sends his warmest regards. They also waited outside the venue for JVM, but were, I think, unlucky (I might be wrong). Still, eleven hours, what's that? Six films? It's nothing, really. Copenhagen seems a very nice place to stand.
2. ...met a nice man named Philip who, on being asked if he knew of any good hostels in the area, invited six random, sweaty/debonair foreign people to sleep at his house, and fed them with alcohol and mattresses and Danish psychedelia.
3. ...came across one of the friendliest and most professional technical crews we've ever had the pleasure of working with, in the venue most evocative of a Stanley Kubrick film we've ever had the pleasure of playing in.
4. ...went for a ride in a helicopter with a cow pilot.
5. 100% of the above.
6. 75% of e.

6) Every crowd was...?

1. So nice that no alternative answer will be offered, as I'm even welling up a little just thinking about the openness and generosity of all the people who saw us. Some of the applause and smiling faces will live with us for a very long time. My heart's fluttering a little, and that very rarely happens, such was the joy of the crowds we were privileged to play to. I'm also going to kind of hide behind a hedge with embarrassment after that little show of authenticity, so I'm now going to leave you in the hands of Dr. Shit.

7) My name is...?

1. Dr Shit.
2. The number-letter-changer; cognitive re-arranger. Tssss.
3. Arltang.
4. W-W-W-dutiful.

8) The road...?

1. ...is long, with many a winding turn.
2. You're still using numbers, rather than letters like you were before.
3. ...leads only to Berlin, where we were held up in traffic for two hours due to an apparent convoy, transporting some American representative somewhere or other. I have no idea if Obama was in town (no doubt droning on about something, right, readers? Ah, illegal, criminally under-reported, poorly managed, robotic warfare, we hardly knew ye.), but if it was him, then we'd like to take this opportunity, which may not come around too often, to blame The President of The United States for making us late for sound-check and putting an inordinate amount of pressure on us and the rest of the crew. Then again, I'm sure he can wriggle out of responsibility by getting another shot of diplomatic immunisation or something. I think diplomatic immunity is like MMR, but much more likely to result in strange psychological effects, damaging the lives of those around you.
4. ...sounds like Brian May with a cold.

9) We thank:

1. We're back to letters? Who the hell is in charge, here?
2. Jörg, Vivien and Mattias, Colin, Philip, Jamie Shaw, James Vincent McMorrow, Justin and the whole crew, all the technicians we worked with, everyone who made our food – especially 'Mr. Lamb Shank' in Copenhagen, who I've always said I wanted to me(at)et LAMB – Carlo, erm...the dinosaurs for dying and giving us fuel. Vauxhall. Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Koln. Our parents for giving us the kind of faces that keep our tour medical bills down to only paracetamol and burn cream. It's weird. It was four dates, but it was one of the most epic weeks of our strange little lives, so it's still a big deal, going out there on a shoestring and being thrust into a world of curious oddities and foreign languages and the kindness of others, which we took all-too readily, and live in fear of disregarding all-too cheaply. I hope everyone who helped us out is in this list somewhere, and, if I discover one day that it is not, then I shall write it in the stars when I die.
3. Jumping Piss Man.
4. Oh! The people who interviewed us. They were very friendly.
5. Satan.
6. Vishnu.
7. All gods who consist of the same substance and have all qualities attributed to them by all religions and also none of them due to their binary nature which is what gives binary possibilities in the first place, that is: all Gods whose existence is made possible only by their non-existence, which is a quality of them.
8. Xenu.
9. The ghost of Rik Mayall.

Thank you for your eternal submission.

Should you have any other queries, I refer you to Ed's staff.

Tim

Phoria Research And Tour Services

There are way too many sentences in the world.

What are we, if not present?

It's not like there's anywhere for us to go, anyway. We're always in here, somewhere. What are you doing? Streaming us? Clicking on a file front and having us blast through speakers that weren't made for us? Having a big black needle-scratched lozenge dance around in the corner of your place on a turntable that your parents would turn their noses at if they cared enough about this century to talk to one of its victims every now and then? They don't care, do they? They don't want anything to do with you. They never have. I've got a theory that every parent, when their child leaves home, joins a secret club and they all get together and bitch about their kids and how much they know that their kids will never know until their kid leaves home. I've always had this feeling that there's some secret to life that gets revealed to you at some point along the way – probably when you least suspect it and hopefully whenever my bloody phone stops ringing.

I suppose that's all good and fine. I'm sure you're loved, really.

New material's at the bottom of the just-boiling pan. To add to my legendary failure to poach an egg the other day (my close friends, at least, know that it turned into an 'underwater frying'), I also failed to boil an egg just twenty-four hours ago. I have no clue what I'm doing wrong. I was standing in my kitchen in my underwear next to the netless windows, stirring the water well with my fly swatter, keeping time by sniffing my herbaceous pits at measurable intervals (being a musician I, of course, have an impeccable internal metronome), and yet when the egg dropped onto the plate it collapsed faster than my dream of being the thing that pings the ball up at the beginning of a pinball session. I just never had the hips.

I mean, that's what brought the vision of the little bubbles that start at the bottom of the pan to mind when thinking about new material. It's born of heat and chemical and structural change, which makes it exciting and indicative of forward thinking, which is important. You have to get this right. There's no point in giving this kind of line to you, a line direct to us (or at least, one of us and perhaps the one most least qualified to conjure images in anybody's head likely to result in our success), if we don't get it right, you know? Everything has to be correct so that the whole music/image/personality of the brand can form a cohesive whole.

I mean, so long as the album cover is a .gif of me scratching my balls and the music consists mainly of my sampled farts and belly slaps, I think it's as cohesive as Nicky Minaj's strategy, and, when you really think about it, inclusive of almost identical content.

Unless the pictures match the music, there's just no point in any of it.

I guess we've all started to assume that the current government is mainly a post-modern performance art experiment, yes? Yes.

This is the last day of idleness and political obsession before hardcore rehearsals (I can't use the word 'practice' any more, as I literally cannot get to grip with each incarnation of it, so 'rehearsal' is now the word) in preparation for our supporting James Vincent McMorrow around Europe next week.

The sense of being and time in this band can be bizarre. Display came out in June and seems to have been really good for us, and enjoyed by lots of people. That's good. But on this side, you want more. You want to make more, do more, experience more, be more, in a kind of childish not only wanting to play with the toy but almost wanting to be the toy and eat the toy and play with the toy, all at the same time. So, whatever you're doing, or not doing, it's not enough, so you get kind of paralysed with movement – not only wanting but needing to go down every road at the same time. We've been here before, but the roads were smoother before and they and led to less. This one is different. It's like choosing which minefield to cross to get to the place where naked people smother themselves in whipped-cream champagne. Last time it was like choosing which country road to walk down to get to a hug from a warm, roadside-hedge-bearded vicar who smelled like lavender and fed you with sticky Murray mints.

Jeb's been in Italy, the git. That's one road you can go down, I suppose. Trewin's been working at the farmhouse. Ed's been trundling around in his new 198...3? I think it's a 1983 Citroen BX. I might have remembered his registration wrong. 'Two lady owners', is the standard description, I think. 'Only drove it to the carvery and back on Sundays.' Suits Ed, then.

Seryn's been indoors, I think, much like myself. It's pretty good. The main thing about spending a lot of time in isolation is that you don't consider how your hair looks, even for a second.

I'll let you think about what kind of paradise that might be when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

We'll see you on tour.

Dates and ticket here. We're with 'The McMorrow' from Hamburg to Cologne.

Don't let us put you off.

And don't forget to pick the news out of this ramble like one of those bogeys that makes you wonder how your funny bone got stuck up your nose.

News: a couple of new tunes, taking shape.

We're gonna kick each others' asses on this one. We want to get this stuff out.

Now, it's Friday, so care must be taken – but be sure, this weekend, to throw your personality at people like monkeys fling their shit at paying customers.

Otherwise, there's no point.

We're nothing, if not present.

Have fun, and don't forget that if you do what needs doing now, then it doesn't need doing, so don't do it.

Tim