Blasted fingers.

Yeah? So what?

So I damaged my tendons in both arms back in August, and am still in pain/can barely play an instrument/type on a keyboard? So I spend all day now watching cold war documentaries and Star Trek TNG? I don't even like Star Trek, but after twelve weeks or so of forced inactivity I've run out of things to watch. But...but...so what? This potential future was at my very birth as a metaphysical midwife . I spent my teens and early twenties as a long-haired progressive rock fan - did anyone seriously not forsee my ending up slapped across an abused bedsheet watching science fiction all day?

What do the band say?

Well I had to skip a gig back in September. OH OH OH says reversing Santa - and that has just made me realise how long it's actually been since I last said hello to you. So I skipped the gig in Brighton at the beginning of September because I was in a phase where I couldn't actually feed myself. My least painful memory of this time is of my “nurse” cutting up a chocolate eclair with a knife and fork, and putting it inside me. At the time, I had little crab-like claws that I could barely use and would make me yelp if I tried to move them. 

Following neatly from that experience, we had to prepare for the postponed Volition launch show at the ICA in London later the same month. I was slowly recovering, but it wasn't a completely easy time for anyone, as you can imagine. It was like Rocky, but instead of starting off as an underground boxer and getting stronger and punching meat and running to the top of a flight of stairs and celebrating, it was more about hardly being able to use a door handle to get out of the house and go to rehearsals where the montage would climax with me flinching at the press of a plastic synthesiser key and saying “I don't know, guys...” and then them going “Oh shit”, and instead of any sense of victory or overcoming there was just defeat and horror and denial and me having to pour tea out of a cup because it was too heavy to lift to my lips.

So round the back of the stage (AKA backshow area Xtreme to those in the business) before the ICA gig I was undergoing urgent self-adminstered treatment of various cooling ointments, massage, and deliciously distilled and necessary anaesthetics. Call it holistic. 

The gig, then, turned into something of a giant exhalation of stress and tension following so much uncertainty. We were there, we had set up a new spider's web of experimental gear (which worked!), a lot of you turned up to see us, and I had managed to make it there to play the songs. I was still on a knife-edge as to whether I'd get a pang of pain or loss of control at any moment, but it seemed that despite the effect of nerves I'd got the dosage just right. We got a lot of great feedback from that gig, and I have to say it felt similar onstage. And offstage afterwards, too. Some gigs are just like that. Despite the stresses – in fact, likely because of them – it was one of my favourite shows that we've played. There's something almost intoxicating about that combination of relief, success, and intoxicants...

And lucky old “New James”, the new member of our sect. It was maybe his third gig with us, or something.

So it's the usual Phoria, for me, of blast-off-extreme-Phoria-time followed by intense rest and rehabilitation. 

Again I had to resist almost all activity before we took a trip up to Scotland for some dates up there. What a great place that is. The air, the love, the cities, the mountains...they all helped with the day-to-day frustration of barely being able to do what I turned up to do. I wasn't convinced that the trip was good for my arms, but hey...that's music. Pot Noodles and Travelodges.

And then it was three weeks in Europe. All time prior, I was barely been able to use my phone – definitely not able to type on a keyboard like I am doing today – and in between stretches and rehabilitation exercises my time was spent slumped against a wall dispassionately watching crap with no option to even read as I couldn't hold a book for too long...and then all of a sudden through the stagnant muck of so much forced inactivity I'm off to Europe for three weeks of gigs and intense party time. 

I don't think I could have survived the down time without the promise that I would be throwing away all healing in a fit of madness doubtless borne of some untouched psychological need for acceptance to which I and my follow swaggerers have surrendered our entire lives.

There's no doubt that this tour was one of the most stupid and therefore best times to be in Phoria. We had our new sound engineer, Ollie, to keep us updated on the technical aspects of every location we hit (I mean every technical aspect of every location. ...we received regular updates from him on the 4G connection speeds along various sections of the autobahn) and we were also carrying a new stage set up that we sometimes had to get ready in ten minutes flat. All this while one man light (of course I couldn't load gear!) with next to no clue where we were going each day or how we would get there. Ed pretended to know, but he didn't really.  It was just the six of us, rumbling around in our little van like blind mice. Lucklily, we hit great crowds and great crew and great hosts and great everything. Berlin - you were as brilliant as ever expected, Nuremburg – you were an experience out of the blue, Munich – you were delicious, and playing with Bat for Lashes in Copenhagen and Poliça in the cool city of Stockholm was exciting and great and all this stuff that's a little too much even now. I thought I needed time to digest it and then it would all come out in a way that made sense but it still doesn't. Time is a different object when the van is your home for nine hours a day, and what you're doing for love and a little money is infused with having to cope with the fact that that's the very thing you should not be doing right now.  

Thanks to everyone who came to and tolerated any of the shows and anyone who came and said hello. It always means the world to us. And thanks to old friends in every city who said hello, too, and thanks to all the interviewers and autograph hunters and new friends that we can't wait to see again, to sleep in your basement for free, or to ravage your incomprehensibly continental kitchen for coffee before we leave in the morning. 

My hands are starting to wane.

So, three and a bit months of a frustrating arm injury that has stopped me from doing the only things I do, punctuated by massive endeavours of gigness that demand all kinds of soul-and-body-based resources. I've had to deal with it, they've had to deal with me, and now here we are many, many weeks later, back from the tour, and I'm listening to Kenneth Brannagh talk about Afghanistan and the integrity of its Northern border in the 1970s with a completely incorrectly placed new hope.

What have we learned, then, from the past few months?

A few things.

I realised that I'm glad of the break my body insisted upon me. I've kept my door closed for much of the recent past, but it's taken this spell of pain and frustration to realise that flogging myself for ten hours a day seven days week for three years or so may not have been in its entirety the best route to self-improvement and/or creative fulfillment. Sure, you have to learn, but my body has hit me back just hard as I hit it with relentless day-long practice schedules and various abuses in my bizarre and potentially pointless quest for otherness. I have a feeling my tank was empty, and, in conking out, my body told me what I needed to hear.

And the band has learned a few things too, as a collective. And I think I know how that is going to manifest itself. The studio is getting a new round of improvements. I can't imagine what for. 

That's it for now. Hope it made sense – I'm out of practice.

Have fun, but take regular breaks.

Tim

...and what could be more entertaining than that!?

Will the collective memory of the internet lead to cultural stasis?

That's the interesting and brand new, exciting question I've been re-asking myself.

I was going to write, like many others have, about Latitude festival (where we played and stayed last week), but - unlike other people who have written about it - I don't even know if there's anything to write about.

It is thought that fiction allows you to empathise better with people and situations (see: Alien). It could be seen almost as a kind of exposure therapy to help us contextualise future experience. This is usually something said of written fiction, but I prefer the example of when the band went to Slovenia and while the vast, cool mountains of that country filled all of us with a deep sense of joy and peace, I couldn't escape the voice in the back of my head that said “Yeah, but I've seen it all before in Skyrim.” (For the uncultured swine: Skyrim is a video game.) The only difference is that in Skyrim, people talk to me.

So the reviews that I've read of the festival mostly consist of a dispassionate list of acts, and submissions for an apparent competition to see who can least creatively describe tents and trees and people in a field. And I wonder if that's because where in decades past there would be a new review every year, nowadays every review or story from every year remains available online, so there's nothing really left to say, or, more importantly, for the reader to know. If 2016 was basically as good as 2014, you have to write something the same, but different, and only different for the sake of having a review of the 2016 version of the event.

But is it possible that we have been so exposed to this kind of permanently available media (Photo no: 3429485325485439464348543574584345. Caption read: “Look! Young people at Glastonbury covered in mud!”) that the glut of available descriptions of the event and subsequent 'exposure therapy' has desensitised us to some degree to the actual experience?

("Ha! Look! Someone diving into the mud pool!" "There are twenty videos on the Guardian 2013 archived live-feed of the best festival-mud-dives 2010-2012. They're much better if not exactly the same." "OK. I'm off to watch Paul McCartney again." etc.)

There are categories and formats that dictate whether or not the content (reviews, media, etc.) - and the thoughts and perceptions contained within - can be recognised as such. It appears to me that what matters in a (hypothetically) desenstitised world is not what the highlights of the festival were, but only that there were highlights. The answer to “What were the highlights?” no longer necessitates the name of an act or event, but more “What were the highlights, you ask!? The highlights were good!” because the elements of a review (and to some extent our own personal expectations of our experience) have been so categorised that it matters only that the criteria for a review or experience were fulfilled, rather than a more abstract sense of what elements made this experience different/of and/or better/worse/tinsel than/from the rest/others./

So are we in danger of entering a period of cultural stasis brought about by the permanence of electronic memory inadequately servicing a desensitised audience who respond to contextual format (commonly labelled content) over actual experiential and/or narratively justified content?

On another topic, we've been practising hard through the heat and the haze, ready for Blue Dot festival this weekend. It's a festival not only about music, but about space and science and stuff, which we like, so that should be interesting even though I could just look up and the sky and be all like “I've seen it all before.”

We're also booking dates and that, for touring and stuff. Even though we've done that already.

We're also booking dates and that, for touring and stuff. Even though we've done that already.

You've already read that bit.

(We're also rescheduling the launch gig. Sorry about all that. Trewin is much better than he was. It was a bad few days. We will make it up to you.)

So it's Friday. The goose is getting fatter and I've got to find some stories to tell.

Grin at someone this weekend. It doesn't matter who.

And grin. Don't smile. Grin. If you smile, I'll know. It's not the same. Give them a knowing grin.

I'm telling you, it's not the same.

And I will know.


Tim


PS. I promise you something fun from Blue Dot. I promise. Perhaps a treatise on common wheel-arch design and the modern people carrier. Or a drawing of me rubbing a tank.

Number nine.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. - Jubkins Lossletops.

[That is, of course, a rationale that if taken seriously can just as easily be used to defend the worst kinds of violent fascism.]

We didn't dream at all, actually, managing to nab about twelve hours of sleep over three days, despite this being one of the better organised of our trips across that stretch of tarmac and furrowed field so flummoxing to island minds such as ours: Europe.

The street and shop signs may well have been in English. We have no idea.

The way we were it's entirely possible that we just drove to the end of the road and started hanging out the doors of the van in fits of jelly-bodied childishness, imagining entirely our exploits; taking the blue sky below us inverted as the sea of the ferry crossing and the pressing faces and queries as standard side-effects of being over there where things are upside down.

No, we went to Zurich.

Fifteen hours only evented (events must happen on a fifteen hour journey, lest the minutes and their tiny drills with which they bore into every imperfection in your powdering skull finally take hold and turn you into an ant farm; hollow chronological threads extended through only bad memories and becoming the very mercurial substance of every grim reflection upon reality that such sojourns in cold and leaky vans allow) by a couple of stops at which we dealt with some surprisingly friendly faces of authority. The police stops are always more fun than the customs stops, which are, of course, customary.

Looks like I got a wink or two last night, doesn't it?

Oh yes, I'm refreshed.

'Pop a few more like that in, Tim, and I might start to enjoy myself!'

And you might think it takes thought to take a tangential turn such as that (and this), but the fact is, as I'm sure you've anticipated, those words have been so aurally scarred into the upper corners of the room in which I'm flopping this log out that their inclusion is actually a concession to the world's impetuousness in forcing its collectively unsatisfied will on my ever frowning frame.

They look at you different when you say you are a musician, and I am not sure if it is pity or a kind of orgasmic awestruck effect at the kind of being they are presented with.

The officers of the law, I mean.

Despite the long hair, despite the eyes that looked like engorged flies dead on top of the poisonous strawberries that inspired their gluttonous passing into the great family picnic or dog shit in the sky, we made our preparations, for a great lol.

'Sunglasses off, lads.'

'Just look friendly.'

'Be quiet, Tim.'

And they took a quick check and let us pass, peering into my little porthole at the rear and judging that everything was alright, as I smiled and waved along with Seryn.

Me and Seryn waving at you through a grubby window in a shaky van.

You wave us on, unwilling to face your fear that the actions of the world upon itself may be far more broad than you ever dared imagine.

The world must be knowable, else all is lost.

-

I mean, everything was quite nice. We had rooms with beds in and a bit of booze here and there and a couple of friendly faces and smiles and helpful people and clean streets...

But the main thrust of the journey, for me at least, was the inducement of a static-caravan of sanity that parked somewhere on our collective neural carriageways but was kept at bay from the town centre of our actual minds.

The road – in particular the sheer length of it – transforms you from debonair fellow-about-the-scenes into a kind of travelling circus animal; locked away until it's time to piss or go and forage for food. And there is no food, because you have no money. So it's always the worst of the world's cuisine. Food as an additive to vehicle fuel; sold alongside it as an afterthought, to trick you into thinking you're hungry for cheese behind that wheel.

I had no idea at any point whether I was hungry or not, but the 'eat or else maybe die' aspect of being alive kicked in to full gear. And that's what I'm talking about. That's what driving on threadbare gets you: a complete change in psyche. The world mauls at the window like car wash brushes while your world consists of 32GB of music and another book, and watching that little real life television bring trees to a kind of psychedelic life while you, again, look back on every poor decision you made when you were twenty-three; why you thought you were right then, and why you are right now in a way you weren't then, and why you will be wrong in the future, but how you will also be right because of being wrong now, and how right that is.

But

but

but

then you

have the pleasure of complete arrival at your destination. When you have arrived at the venue and you have completed your sound-check and packed and unpacked and been shown around and shown the fridge and the backstage and given the codes and told all and wherewithal and whom then then then you have the pick of the place, and every luxury afforded you. Your status is entirely reversed from forager to one whom people will forage for in order to attend to. And suddenly you are brokered a million cigarettes and freshly iced beer cans and little molten gems of amber whisky in exclusive surroundings. And friendly smiling faces that stay static, and don't just brush by with the ferns. And suddenly, after being spun around in your office chair with your tie wrapped around your head, it is whipped off, and you make your way to your big birthday cake that someone balanced on top of the photocopier, next to the gin and pornography.

But this happens over the course of days, and is eked out in slow motion.

And you spend the last few dulling moments of it at the hotel breakfast, still dizzy, still sleepless, shovelling more pig meat and cheese into your now rotten gullet because you know what's ahead.

And then from the warm hotel lights and dizzy swim of every party, the van door slides shut again and SLAM. The world by accident becomes a little greyer and caged again and you start to smell the seats that smell like seats and you are locked in tupperware again.

And in the ride on the way home the weather is bad. So at the back end of the great white elephant you're travelling in you feel like a rubber raft on the back of a speedboat; your stomach lurching over every change in direction to correct for crosswinds, water leaking in through the roof, brain crunching into an emergency filtered state and then relaxing again, all through the fog of a hangover quilted only by a layer of alien-magic Burger King milkshake that had you laughing four minutes after first drinking it. Full of something not from here. Full of the thing that holds the air together, I'm sure. A baffling drink that could only make me think of Milhouse and Bart and their all syrup Squishy, or the millions of people who currently use amphetamines recreationally.

And then its dark.

It was night.

And I got sleep.

And now I'm doing this.

And now we'll keep doing the album, until the next one.

And I'll buy a cushion.

Have fun,

Tim

P.S. It's Trewin's birthday.

Trewin: setting fire to your computer screen.

 

Mo music, mo music, mo music.

Another week, another week.

It’s been social, it’s been fruitful.

Two new songs popped up out of nowhere (Trewin), which, as usual, put things in a mass of choice-al [made up word mine] crisis. It’s like Ed, Seryn, Jeb, and I are running naked through a forest (yes), skipping through the low-lying leaves and rubbing ourselves against the monkeys while Trewin, poking his blow gun out of a stealth drone, takes us down with sweet paralysing poison. We’re now on the floor, in the mud, all covered in drool and talking nonsense...and then the poisonous effects of Trewin’s darts take effect! (At that point I expected you to think that the drool and crap was to do with the darts, but then cunningly confound your expectations using ‘sentences’, which, if I was unsuccessful on my first attempt, I have surely achieved now.) WOOOGLADTOKNOWYOU

So the poison (songs) takes us off into a magical world of unreality (music) but leaves us still and shaking on the ground in cold jungle moonlight. Let’s just throw them all out, yeah? I don’t mean in the bin, I mean into the ether. Into the great beyond. Into the broad faces of those who love us. Let’s just bung them out and throw CDs like frisbees off the top of The Shard, hack the BBC news site and get the mp3s blasting out - changing all the headlines to things like ‘Jeremy Hunt finally sees moral and economic short-sightedness in non-specific Americanisation’ – making people happy and hopeful. Let’s slide our pieces through everybody’s letterbox. Let’s turn every streetlight into a projector, showing all of Jeb’s videos on a continuous 24-hour loop across the entire country for the rest of time. Let’s replace police sirens with ‘Once Again’, so anybody in trouble can just get a hug and be OK and then sit down with the police officer and have a chat and everybody can do the same and we’ll have a cup of tea, yes? Let’s have a cup of tea. And when the kettle boils it’ll sing a Phoria song. And Grandma’s slippered feet as she collects the kettle will play out a skittish little Phoria beat and she’ll dance and smile as a tear, rich with regained memories of hope, slowly forms in her eye, around which lays the cruel cartography of a life so hard until this moment. And  then the new octopus blasts a foghorn in her face.

And then we wake up. In the jungle. Trewin hovering around above us, having written another ten songs while we were comatose. And now we don’t know what to do.

But that’s OK.

It’s all very good news.

We’re very flattered to be mentioned on this blog list of the best tracks of 2013. Any list that has us at No. 1 above Arcade Fire and Beyonce is OK with us.

In other news, Jeb and I set up the band projector in our top-secret bunker the other night, and experienced this shotgun cartridge of a film:

I can only recommend you do the same (if you have three hours). It is a Friday, and all that.

Do stay well. Have fun.

I’m off to dig in the made up word mine.

Tim

Hugh, more or less.

            Christmas is just around the corner, isn’t it? Can you feel it? I can, weighing on me like an elephant. Every penny counts, so don’t be surprised if we can’t send you all an individually engraved solid gold statue of Seryn on the toilet. I can barely afford the one I bought for myself.

            The new EP is being groomed, like a prize dog. The last few hairs are being glued into place with Copydex. You know, the stuff you used in primary school then never ever used again, and don’t forsee ever using again, because it smells so bad and you go home and realise you’ve got a bit of it stuck to one of your fingers and peel it off and roll it up into a ball and play with it for a bit. Yeah, like that.

            I have no idea how it actually sounds. It’s become a part of the furniture, now. We hope everybody will like it.

            It might be being put through some interesting channels. We’ll know more when we know more, and you’ll know more when we decide to tell you we know more. For now, we know enough, and that's enough to spur us on and keep us believing through the cold, dry nights.

            This intense poverty is taking its toll on our sanity, I think. I say this every now and again – such is the way when you get five young(ish) people working together, chasing after an oasis. The power of belief can be enough, for the most part, but sometimes it fades and you’re left alone, in a desert, surrounded only by voices coming from far away, telling you’re not good enough, and should be doing more to ‘get us all out of this mess’. Still, you’ve got to plough on, haven’t you. ‘It’ll be fine’ is pretty much the band motto. I just romanticise it into a kind of 21^st century bohemia. Maybe this will all be looked back upon in one of those ‘I love 2013’ programmes, beamed straight into your eyeballs using Google Retina, and it’ll be ‘Oh yeah we had to hold our house together with bits of string and use guitars made out of felt tips. Great times. I’m so happy we went through that and developed character…’ all the while resting our feet on some slave or other, sipping 25 yr old Glenmorangie in our Canadian mansion while our enemies dig in the dirt outside for a briefcase containing £100,000 that we told them we hid somewhere, but didn’t.

            We’re still straddling that line between envelopment and isolation. It’s a tightrope, for sure, but we are definitely getting there. We have to remember that.

            We have you guys, anyway, and that’s enough to get us through. Of course, as always, your support and nice words make all the difference.

            So, the cold has snapped in, Christmas has taken all the jolly out of us, and now I’m just a whining old wind-up merchant. The best kind of company, and the best kind of person to let you know how we’re doing, now and then.

            I didn’t mean to bum you out. Don’t cry. We’re fine. The future looks rosy, but it’s like when the iPhone 5 comes out and someone says ‘You can’t have it right now, you have to wait for the iPhone 6 – it comes out next week.’, and you’re all ‘Well that’s OK, that’s great. But I’d very much like an iPhone 5. Like, now.’

            Temporal materialistic urges transferred onto idealism. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s healthy.

            Have fun, and stay warm, whatever you’re up to, or not.

            Tim

PS. Say hello to Mr Ando.

My idea of 'chilling out'.

            What a great gig at The Old Market on Monday night. Efterklang were great, the crew were so friendly and professional, and, shucks, you the audience stood up and listened and applauded and got drunk and smiled and put on a new pair of trousers and sank and put a parsnip on the wall and touched the snail and did a little dance and wave, just for us. For this, we thank you.

            A quick apology to those who may have been queueing at the merch stand after our performance only to be turned away by the guy hawking the Efterklang stuff. We’d failed to inform said guy of any of the prices (so he couldn’t inform you when asked), and we’d forgotten to…you know, attend to our own merch stand. We did get there in the end, and all was beautiful. If you missed out on buying it from us on the day, or have just decided that in fact you do want that t-shirt (perhaps as a gift for Grandma?), just click here to fulfil your wildest dreams.

            We were all so knackered yesterday, but we hung out and drank tea and had a meeting and sorted out stuff for the future. Focus, ahoy!

            What are we doing today? Well…chilling out, for the most part. I’m going to spend some time investigating the very interesting Conservative MP Peter Bone (such investigations shall hereby be known as ‘Boning’) and the Midlands Industrial Council as part of my interest in the bill currently worming its way through the House of Commons to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights (the first attempt to pass a similar bill was shut down several years ago, but the new one has the word terrorists in the title, and so has been gifted political teeth). Peter Bone – who is sponsoring the bill - has also supported bills meant to: deport those seeking political asylum; limit women’s reproductive rights; and reinstate the death penalty, two of which, I believe, are due for a second reading early next year. He’s also the brains behind ‘Margaret Thatcher day’, which is just the best idea ever and has not yet been thrown out. He’s also part of this political group who seem to have been bought forward in time from a Victorian salon, and believe in 'proper pride in our nation's distinctive qualities'. Allow me to indulge in sinister innuendo, if that sort of thing interests you at all.

            I mean, all of those things sound like a right lark after running several disasterous companies and receiving money from dark coalitions who don’t have to declare their members or their means of income (also: employing your own wife as ‘executive secretary’ and plonking her on the highest allowable MP's secretarial wage), but I am just, you know, full of hate for those who clearly so desperately want to selflessly improve this country for the citizenry that they represent. So, I’m genuinely going to spend my time looking further into it/him today for my own sanity and knowledge, and that’s why I’m telling you about it. 

            Back to business:

            The others might be making music or videos.

            Don’t forget that inbetween all the Boning we’re playing at this very lovely gig in Notting Hill for Communion this coming Sunday 3^rd November. This is a bill I can support. Come along. We’ll badger you until then, anyway.

I hope you’re having fun.

            Tim

Three little gigs.

What a couple of days/weeks this has been.

I’m typing this on a half melted, half absent set of keys on my hardy little laptop. My lady and I (absent) had a relatively minor fire in our flat two days ago. Two days ago while the band were stranded just off the A2 in London, our van Binky having broken down about 20 mins from the The Old Blue Last where we were scheduled to play for some very interesting people. Half of the keys on my keyboard are gone, so in an act of poverty driven defiance I’m typing directly onto the little rubber buttons that usually rest unseen behind the wall of helpful Roman characters. I don’t recommend this technique. I will now call it ‘Xtreme touch typing’.

As the fire spread, licking the Terminator and Metal Gear Solid posters and other ephemera that line the wall of ‘Tim’s corner’, my heroic little bundle of sense exhibited the attitude that got everyone through the last few days – sort the guitars first, and everything else can be sorted later. I smiled with relief (after asking after her wellbeing, of course. Of course. Ahem.) as she recounted her tale of leaping over the bed like a kangaroo to save my precious Rihanna and Betty (a relic-ed US Stratocaster and baby blue telecaster, respectively) from Satan’s faulty-hairdryer-fuelled clutches. They are safe and warm [sic], and thanks to my constant drilling of my girlfriend [sic] in the most dangerous and irresponsible ways of tackling large fires on your own, my precious collections of dangerously graphic ‘art’ films and hate letters to Michael Gove remain unscathed. Please show your love to her under the codename ‘Fire-officer Grimsby’, should you so wish.

Meanwhile, as she was pansying around with that shit, Phoria had three gigs in three days, four days after our return from eleven days on the road through Europe. That’s a total of three hundred million days.

Thanks to all who came to all. Your support is so incredible and we really appreciate it. It’s so nice to do what you do through all the stresses and worries and waiting three hours for the recovery services and flagging down amazing strangers in vans who take you to the venue in exchange for a modest fee and people you met in Croatia who come to the gig and take you in and buy you beers because you have nowhere else to stay, and at the end of it all see a new bunch of smiling strangers who so kindly express their enjoyment of what you’ve just smashed out through a suffocating sweat onstage. The promoters, also, showed a great deal of patience in dealing with us and our Laurel and Hardy ways.

So it has to be said that the day is done for me. All the band have earned a day of rest. Ed’s going on holiday, so the focus for now is on the new EP, which is taking shape for release this year. That’s right. Bloodworks was our nemesis for a while. A slow, cold war. This one’s going to be slick and easy. The songs have been brewing for a long time anyway – now all we have to do is pour the tea (tea being a metaphor for the songs) and wait for you to spill it all over yourselves in bed because your partner didn’t realise you had a hot drink in your hand and moved around really violently to improve their view of Ainsley Harriot’s Go-kart Meringue Vol. VII.

So yes, a new EP. Gigs. More stories from Croatia, once I’ve sorted a new keyboard.

I’m going to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and eat chicken nuggets.

For now, have fun, and remember: sort the guitars first, and all else shall follow.

Tim

P.S. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Downbeat. Upbeat.

Right, well...

It's now the Monday after the Friday after the night before.

We got home at about 5am last Friday morning after our EP preview at The Queen of Hoxton. This late arrival was the result of a long drive involving three failed sat-navs, Seryn needing to be dropped off near a shepherd's bush, our nearly running out of fuel, and numerous diversions leading to the seventh circle of the M25. Ed and I were the only ones awake as we approached Brighton, keeping each other perked up by telling detailed stories, usually of an explicitly romantic nature, of time spent in the company of various renowned tyrants. Result of: 22 waking hours.

And all that (diversions, lies) after the big gig itself.

If you came, thank you. Oh, and we're sorry about that massive technical hitch that left us stranded onstage without a synthesiser, and without hope, for what in reality was about ten minutes, but what, onstage, in the reflected glare of bright lights in hopeful eyes, felt like about seven hours. If you didn't come, there's a brief explaination of the massive technical hitch in the sentence preceding this one. You missed out on a peek behind our IKEA scenery. Pay no attention to the frantic sound engineer behind the curtain. I like to think of it as a John Cage-like experiment in anti-music, but incorporating the progressive-jazz spirit of entirely unintended improvisation. That's how I like to think of it.

Still, we previewed the EP, and, even if, briefly, it was a preview of what it would sound like if you tried to play it through a shoelace, I liked it.

Away from all of that, away from the horrors of mass transit systems and sickening software slip-ups, away from broken down vans and this little itchy patch of skin in the groove beside my achilles tendon, away from thinking about the war-mongering alien species living in the centre of the sun, who have so far missed our planet with their gravity slingshots of solid rock and gas giants but who will, inevitably, be named our great overlords, forcing us to bow down and kiss the slimy robe of God-saint Tencatu, famed as Prime-master, merciless slayer of the weak; away from that...

/There was a bit of good news here, which I have now edited out as it might not be happening. Good. Good. Let's move on./

/This blog is now empty of positivity./

Enjoy your panicky christmas shopping, everyone! I don't know what to get for anyone, either.

Except Ed.

Tim