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.

 

Just come to the gig tomorrow.

There are glitches on some video games that have gained relative internetty fame where the characters appear not with faces and freshly rendered, plump fake flesh, but merely as eyes on stalks, sometimes with wide, toothy, lipless grins.

"I do."

Cheery elements of facial features suspended in mid-air.

That's pretty much how we are right now.

It's been a ring-around-the-rosie of various illnesses and viruses in the band, culminating in my laying on my stomach in the middle of the practice room yesterday trying not to sing a symphony onto the floor while Sez handled his sneezed out snot like the sands of time; forever trickling through hands, flowing like Italian dough, the others looking on through braeburn apple eyes regretting every decision they'd ever made.

We've all had something or other over the last few weeks. I can only hope we're over it, now. I certainly feel better. I give it an hour. I found a pecan slice under the fridge but I'm being sensible and trying not to eat it too fast.

So, after how-many-days?-I-have-forgotten of wall-to-wall rehearsals, we're on the last day of them today. We are getting it together, of course, for this show at Cargo...tomorrow. New material, and all that. Always worth a mention. Album songs that you wouldn't have heard before. Just a couple. Just a couple of newbies thrown in there being heard for the first time tomorrow night. With a string quartet. Just a couple of new songs. From the album. Just a couple.

Shit. Is it tomorrow? It totally is.

Don't worry – we're ready – it's just that it's been so long since we played in the UK that the whole idea of playing has become a little alien. 

It's too early.

But then 

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

Death and bad PR.

But why are the kids crying?

Haven't you heard? Rik is dead! The people's poet is dead!

But how can Rik be dead when we still have his poems?

Dammit, death. Why did you have to have to...

Ah, never mind. We're as bummed as all of you, OK? Just see Richard Richard off with a two-fingered salute and we'll have done with it.

We've been weeping into our keyboards, then. Blue sparks flying everywhere. We'll be sporting new hairstyles at the launch this coming Monday. Think Dr Emmet Brown mixed with 80s Tina Turner.

We've been going at it really rather hard. OK? We've pretty much spent the last seventy-two hours getting stuff down: putting new samples on new gear, getting stuff wrong, trying to make a couple of lights look like Guy Fawkes farting on a candle at the wrong time.

It's good to be so concentrated.

Let's see what happens. I can't emphasise enough how excited and/or shit-panteningly scared we are about the launch on Monday. Not so much the launch gig at St. Pancras (which I'll mention here again), but just...getting Display out of the door on its heels. Nothing but a sleeping bag (vinyl sleeve) and a couple of quid (no metaphorical analogue, here); out on its arse (music). I know the fine people at X Novo have been doing one of those bang up jobs I so often hear about.

Loads of radio stuff, which we're really grateful for. I even had an old friend get hold of me the other day saying he'd come across our stuff accidentally on Radio 1, and is now, at last, a fan. I've been telling him to listen to us for years.

Basically this whole 'growth' thing (not that one – I've had that lanced) is just an opportunity for us to weed out the wheat from the chaff as far as our extended social networks are concerned.

It's a very hurtful experience.

Keep listening, then.

Tim.

New monday.

It's a deliciously cold and rainy bank holiday, and we're holed up in Trewin's attic working on a delicious new setlist. There's nowhere I'd rather be on a day like today than here listening to delicate piano lines and pretty little guitar motifs.

Now all it needs is a bass line phat and heavy enough to melt time.

Right, guys?

Tim