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

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

'Something in the way she moves, affects me like no other mower.' - Something (it is a lawnmower) by The Beatle.

It's been about four weeks.

'My God...has it been that long? Martin! We've got to fly you into some of the past!'

That's how long it takes us to start living and lose all sense of 'band-time', only to regain the pace and begin again to watch the life drain out of us like dirty water in Norman Bates' bathtub.

There's a good excuse for our prolonged absence. The Northern hemisphere calls it 'Summer', and I hear that's exactly what it was. I wouldn't really know, as I've spent much of it inside, debating with my brain about whether it should debate with itself [we won!], and whistling along to The Bill theme tune. I've also eaten lots of vegetables because I hear they're food, now, and developed a cure for beard dandruff which involves covering your neck in anti-gravity hunting paint, submerging your head in a bucket of dead wasps, and blinking faster than a 1970s entertainer driving to buy a new computer. In my estimate the cure takes seven to ten years to take effect so here's hoping it works otherwise I'll have wasted the time I have spent on doing that to have the cure for it and stop it from being there when it is !have!

So, yes. You can see I've been busy and keeping on an even keel.

Trewin's been living on a farm, so it seems. He's had us over, once or twice, to ride the lawnmower [not rude] and paddle a little paddle boat around a great big god-damn lake. I tell you one thing, though: he never offered us a cup of tea. Not once. I'll never go there again; a situation in which I am doubtless the victor.

Jeb's been in his room, again, editing. Still.

I keep a little doll house of where everyone in the band is, so I can keep track and play with them and make them do things [not rude things!] when no-one else is around and when I'm just about to have a shower so I can properly picture what they're doing at all hours of the day without resorting to booting up the laptop and logging in to the 'safety-cam' network. The Jeb doll hasn't moved except for me to clean it up and wipe the tears of loneliness and fear from its face.

I threw the Trewin bit in the garden and I think a bird got it.

I take the Seryn bit in and out. Sometimes it's submerged in a glass of wine, surrounded by women's underwear and stuff, and sometimes it's in its room staring vacantly at the wall wondering why toenails, given sniff, do smell.

I sent the Ed bit around Europe and the UK in a sterilised envelope to simulate all of Ed's holidays that he's been on. I took the time to fumigate his part of the dolls house and plug in a Glade plug-in so that hopefully he'd forget about while he was out but ooh! a fresh surprise on his return.

There's some new music in the works, too, and we've had a couple of meetings and plans for going forward with a track or fifty and what we want to do and when we want to do it and, more importantly, why?

Why?

Well, for you, of course.

 

For you.

So that's our summer, post-tour.

We're off to Berlin on Thursday, which should be...you know. Nice.

We're looking forward to it a little bit.

Here's the gig.

If you're around (which let's face it, you probably are I mean it's only Berlin) then you should come.

Fun fun fun and back to work.

The evenings are getting dark again, too, which means I'm getting happier.

Enjoy the fruits of your labours, and the delights of your friends and family.

Unless you hate your job and other people, in which case just get by as best you can.

Watch a film, or something.

Bye.

Tim

Soundwave festival is taking place on the Southern coast of...

...Croatia.

This has been the theme for the past...eight or nine days. It's all any of us can think about, it's all any of us are acting upon, and, at the expense of our bellies, it's the only thing that's making those small numbers shrink even further into oblivion. I see the descent and subsequent rise of those pretty little figures marked 'overdraft' as the final death throes of reason and accountability. 'F*ck it', we say. We're still young, and we're going to drive across Europe to play music at a massive party festival.

Lake Bled in Slovenia; one of our scheduled stops. Not pictured: The relentless march 

of industrial and economic progress.

The road holds its own promise. Ed, myself, and Trewin will be sharing the driving equally between us. Trewin insisted yesterday - 'For the duration of the trip, we become 'Yes Men'. We take everyone up on any offer of accommodation, parties, whatever.'
I'm certainly up for an adventure (see: not being held for ransom).

So, there it is. All is booked, and the only thing that's been packed so far is my Speedo.

Oh yes, music: the art of the musician. Well, we got together for the first time in a long time yesterday, Trewin's voice having finally healed. That's right, you heard it here first (unless you're in the band, a circumstance of which there is a 5/7,079,000,000 chance). We weren't great to start off with - rusty hinges and all. Towards the end we got it, and tonight we'll be down there again, smashing away and big lumps of songs until we remember how to play them, and how to break them into a million pieces in front of thousands of people.

Talking of breaking things; millions of people, the CDs arrived, finally:

Not pictured: Mountains of cash; Alf Ramsey chainsaw juggling.

We've also got t-shirts. That's right, pledgers - after promises and promises and apologies and 'a couple of days' turning into a couple of weeks, we feel we managed to break your spirits just enough to eventually send some stuff out to you. You'll see them in a couple of days, weeks, months, etc. (Seriously: they're going out as I type.) (Sorry again for all the delays.)

Both products will soon be available for purchase.

So, that's it. What with hay-fever taking my spirit from me and Croatia occupying my mind, that's all I can be bothered to write. I feel it adequately informs you how we are, what we're doing, etc. While also adding another aspect of personality to the public perception of Phoria. Likeable? Perhaps not, but (supposedly) consumable content with which the audience is able to engage, which must, like our home-spun cheese, be regularly churned.

It's another hot, sunny day, and it's FRIDAY! 

Have an ice cream and stare at the sun.

Tim.

PS. We have a spare ticket for accommodation and festival entry which we're looking to sell. If you're interested, email us at phoriamusic(at)hotmail.com

PPS. That (at) is so that spambots that scour these blogs can't steal our address and send us loads of penis enhancement pills. We've got plenty of those already. So put an @ there, not (at). You probably knew this already, but I'd hate for you not to come to Croatia with us just because of one little mistake. You in particular. Yes, you. I am actually referring to you as an individual. This is not a trick. CROOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAATTTTIIIIAAA