The smells, Esmerelda...

            After the last week, what with a visit from parental units A & B, the suspense of various meetings and/or fashionable dates taking place, and our rather disconcerting and looooong experience at Cargo last Friday, I ended up performing an accidental biological experiment on myself, inspired by tiredness.

            If you’re in any way squeamish, I suggest you plug your nose and eyes…

            …mmm…

            …now.

I sweated A LOT during our last gig. What with the stage lights, a full room, a long day, and various stimulants (entirely legal, fact fans) plugging my system…yeah. I sweated a lot. I slept that night on a dirty sofa, and wore those same clothes in a fit of fatigue for maybe three days before changing into my ‘sweats’, as I believe the colonies call them.

Today - seven days (or one Craig David) later - I showered.

This is the kind of insight that you simply don’t get from other musical acts. Such is the nature of a newswire maintained by a man who watched All Dogs go to Heaven one too many times as a child. What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. The more we share, the more we’re gonna get. I assumed as a little lad that those dogs were of course referring to intimate states of mental arousal and opinion, rather than material goods which should be hoarded at all costs. And a fine job of that we are doing, too.

So I showered and changed my frilly undercrisps for the first time in a week, today. What did I find on my journey of soap and Darwinian Beagle-y wonder? Weird red blotches in bodily creases that I did not know existed. Enough belly-button fluff that I won’t need to buy a Christmas jumper this year, and, according to my topmost follicles, that my flat in fact has its own microclimate where it regularly snows whenever it’s not raining butter.

The reason why it took this long to succumb to ‘common personal hygiene’ was not just laziness, but also that I’ve been tying up my time in various creative projects, none of which involved leaving the house. Writing for extended periods of time? So long as the solidified crust around my arms doesn’t prevent me from reaching the keyboard (of my laptop which often sits on my lap, breathing its humid breeze around that most coveted of unwashed areas, fact fans), then why bother presenting myself, visually or nasally? My little partner in love doesn’t care, or at least she says she doesn’t, so, apart from out of loving respect for her, what possible reason do I have to ‘clean’ myself? I’ll only get dirty again.

Of course, things grew on me, things lived on/in me, and things…changed. I am now my own eco-system, supporting strange, reddened, bulging life forms. I am one with my cotton t-shirt.

Using the hairdryer to better dry my body actually sent wafts of strange odours around the room. This is something that has never happened before. So not only were my findings biological, they also pertained to convection patterns and other physical processes.

All in all, it was an accidental experiment that has taught me…nothing.

I am now clean, just so you all know.

 The next time I follow basic hygiene protocols will be at our very exciting gig supporting Efterklang on 28^th October. This is a damn cool gig to be involved in. We’ve been listening to them for years, so it’s a little ‘Hurrah!’ in the Phoria logbook.

Very exciting.

We’re also currently number two (by far my favourite number below sixty-eight) in the ReverbNation chart. That’s pretty good. It would be nice to be number one, but number two is fine, you know. We’re happy with that.

If you’re not happy with that, by the way, then feel free to tell your friends to click and listen to us on ReverbNation and just everywhere and buyeverything and listen to everything.

I’m on toothbrush strike until we reach the top.

The new stuff is still underway.

Gingivitisly yours on this energetic Friday,

Tim

What we are made for.

            You came to see us at Cargo, some of you.

            Thank you for that.

            Check out the guys at Petulant Penguin and go to one of their other nights, too. They are lovely and deserve all the success they’ll no doubt achieve in the increasingly science-fiction-comparable City of London.

            The other bands, too: Leaving Atlantis and My New Favourite Tribe

            The gig was good. We’d been there since one o’clock in the afternoon, and spent a good five hours soundchecking; getting things ready for another aurally spacious gig with a slimmed down version of the Phorchestra. Many will balk at that name, but I embrace it if only in an obvious attempt at post-irony.

            There was an issue during said soundcheck as we discovered that the light on one side of the stage was blocked by a large tubular ventilation shaft running along the ceiling. This light was necessary for the willing members of the Phorchestra to read their parts. (They read their music off sheets of paper - not like real musicians like myself who insist on vaguely memorising a series of notes, then panicking constantly or using Pterodactyl based memory tricks to crack open the floodgates of your soul.)

            Trewin stepped up as soon as the problem was outlined, and in a ‘flash’ of genius and telecommunicative sacrifice he fired up the torch on his ancient phone and swiftly duct taped it to the ventilation shaft that was causing all of the problems.

            Problem: solved.

            …until we started playing, and it became violently apparent to those who weren’t spellbound by the sound at front of house that Trewin had neglected to put his phone on silent. I can still see one violinist, and you know who you are, sniggering as Trewin’s personally selected one-consciousness-trance ringtone sang at us from across the stage. I didn’t manage to catch your eye, here unnamed violinist, but I shared your upturned corner-of-mouth and juddering shoulders.

            In the van on the way home Ed also mentioned a ‘strange rumbling sound that was kind of in a rhythm, but was totally out of time with the rest of the music.’ It was not until my head had been neatly placed onto a pillow that the neurons fired to tell me it must have been Trewin’s phone vibrating against a hollow metal tube that spanned the entire length of the room. I blame the technical staff, as is the musician’s tradition. I hope none of you noticed…

            Another one:

            As we took to the stage, Trewin said a polite hello and indicated that ‘we will be starting with kind of a quiet one, so…it might be worth simmering down a bit.’ Quiet followed. Then the frequency splitting hiss of the dry ice machine whirring into action for a good seven seconds. I see this as an obvious display of technological sentience and protest that will one day result in our music being played in a future-war scenario as thermal-goggled geo-clones wage war through billows of dry ice to defeat the evil AI (housed in the body of a robot shark) insistent upon causing farcical scenarios. This is how it starts. Do not blind yourself to the reality of the situation.

            So far, so Spinal Tap.

            Then we tripped and fell down the rabbit hole.

            Gig finished. ‘Hurrah!’ we all said, turning around to see our equipment immediately being man-handled offstage and almost thrown through the back door into a pile of wide-eyed drinkers. ‘Let’s get this shit out of here’ one white-shirted, and clearly very important and direct and practical man hissed to his co-workers. It was nice. Can we go through this door? I’m carrying an amp that weighs more than me! No. OK. But this is a door, right? Yes, I'm going to get out just as soon as I find a door I can get through. Can I get my stuff from backstage? No. Oh…how do I? Erm…

            Luckily I tend towards video games that rely on stealth-mechanics - all calculation and timing - and I also have this fantasy where I’m a total badass whocouldbreakintothisbigmilitaryinstallationifireallywantedtobutijustdon’twanttotodayso. So I managed to blend in seamlessly with the ‘club night’ that had immediately popped up in our wake as if the people were once invisible and several bags of flour had just been released from the ceiling; I got the security code (to which I was rightly entitled) and managed to get backstage to retrieve my precious, precious plastic bag with my shoes in. Then I walked away, lighting a cigarette while the whole barrage of ‘retro’ beats and flesh exploded behind me in a huge ball of flames that resembled my smiling face.

            The post-gig strictness was foreshadowed by our navigating an entranceway that Jeb rightly pointed out was scarily dystopian in nature, so in fairness we should have seen it all coming. It’s right, of course, that stringent security measures are in place at certain venues. If I was giving them slips of paper in direct exchange for a can of beer and receiving no change I would also want the peace of mind that comes from being in a place that follows the protocol of a lockdown in San Quentin. That’s a good thing. Everyone feels safe. A bit like the internet in a couple of months. Safer for everyone.

            At the entranceway you are asked for photo identification, whomever you may be and however old you may look. That’s OK - knowing who’s in the building and all that. But, hilariously, your ID is put into a scanner above which sits a huge screen that proceeds to display your photograph, name, and age. It couldn’t have been any more Demolition Man if it had a big flash of green text saying ACCESS GRANTED CITIZEN #41729. REAP THE REWARDS OF CONSUMPTION. Jeb’s ID picture is hilarious, and the door staff didn’t even crack a hello before they frisked us.

            Of course, had the security not been so efficient, we would no doubt feel less comfortable having the staff leave our gear outside among the throng of jeans-and-suit-jacket drinkers. At least we would know who it was who had stolen it. Not that prosecutions based on that technology alone are successful.

            All good. We’ll hit Cargo again. Go there.

            A special shout to Louie, who came and sorted out some special visuals. Great work, champ. Live projection mapping and all that.

            After all of that it was a party or home. I was knackered, so we split into two groups. Some went partying (I heard one of us was spotted in the early hours of Saturday striking up jaunty conversations with strangers on the tube…) and some went back to Brighton to recline and listen to music after a long day/week/month. Ed, in his sobriety, took on the mantle of ‘absolute hero’ with his flu-inspired late night driving.

            We listened to some great music, but I don’t remember what it was. Jeb – can you put a couple of the bands in the comments section on facebook or something? I’m sure the people want to know what we listen to when we hang out. …right?

            Love to you all, on this fantastic autumnal Sunday.

            THIS ENTRY WAS NOT WRITTEN BY ANYONE AFFILIATED WITH PHORIA. PHORIA AND ASSOCIATED PERSONS DO NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSE ANY OR ALL OPINIONS STATED HEREIN. FACTS ARE THEY.

            Tom

           

           

           

This is how we are.

            There are two ways - and only two ways - to deal with waking up too early.

The first is to lay there struggling to sleep/wondering where your arms suddenly appeared from/trying to displace the looming sense of inevitability that grows incorrigibly behind your eyeballs. ‘Drift away, like a dropped twenty pound note in a summer’s breeze’, you enforce upon your psyche which just mugs you off and dances around staring at you and wearing a witch's grin. It blasts a dirty song in your cerebral cortex, it does.

The second is to spring into action at 5am, fully aware that come 11 you’ll hit the ground and smash like a baby squirrel.

            Tomorrow is Cargo, as if you didn’t already know (know what? That tomorrow is Cargo!) As if you didn’t already know. (Know what?) Hey! So along with the new EP, colds and flu, meetings and other things in our backstage area, and my parents coming to town, it’s been one of those weeks not made for brains. We’ve been looking forward (inevitably) to this gig for the most part, but now that it’s actually here we’ve ended up looking forward but feeling backward. It’s a bit like that tickle you get when you get out of the bath that’s simultaneously lovely yet unbearable. Or like that time when that cheap barber (‘doctor’!) set your shoulders on fire.

            It ain’t easy (despite how we make it look), and my body has perused the mouth of the rest horse and declined its offer. Just to make everything easier.

            Trewin’s in quarantine, far from this madding crowd’s ignoble strife and priceless knives.

            I can feel a sniffle coming on. Ed’s one of those people who warns you to stay away and then sprays his sneeze across a room. I’m one of those people who breathes in sneezes.

            So, that’s that. I won’t see you at practice today. You’ll be hiding around the corner out of sight along with the point of life, won’t you? I know your giggle, though. I record you. I’m also extremely proficient at echo-location, like those raisin-birds.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Have fun, however much confusion, panic, and fatigue might control your moment to moment decision making and moods.

            Tim

'My model railway is just down these stairs.'

            it got more and more delightful

            in between the shimmering screen and the rough rope that bound my wrists somewhere in the hollow dark somewhere in the sound that bounced off concrete archways and drowned the drips of the wet cellar somewhere above the snapping click clack of the four of us dancing in our chairs trying to escape rubbing our shin bones raw somewhere beyond the prancing shadow figure who preyed upon us all in turn blanking out the scrolling screen our only source of light merely looking down on us and smiling somewhere from hell and heaven mixed

            came a voice

            so what do you think of the new ep lol he said

            he ripped the tape from our lips and took some skin

            its great its nearly there we said

            good he said because theres loads of music on it that is nearly there

            yes we know we said not too long now

            not too long now he said and then he gave us some hugs and stroked our hair 

if we get let out we will be at cargo on Oct 4th

           

           

Screen if you want to go faster.

Good golly – is it the Monday after, already? How the b*stard did this roll around so soon?

            The hangover - the loss of temporal function - is from Thursday night’s Soundscreen performance at Brighton Corn Exchange. HundredthAnniversary and Luo were ego-stultifyingly good, as were the big videos that were projected behind each band. Well done to everyone – the bands, the video artists, the stage crew, The Phoria Orchestra (yeah), Soundscreen…

            Thanks to everyone who came, too. It looked like a full house from where I was. That’s very nice of you. We like to be watched. This goes out to all you kids at GCHQ, too.

            This was a nerve-fracking one. We all went a little bit wrong from about an hour before the show until it was actually time to play. Jeb wasn’t the only one to walk away from me, saying ‘I just…I  just can’t deal with you right now.’ I can’t be more honest than saying that is totally fair. I’m just jealous that he actually can get away from me – I, on the other hand, am stuck here. A jellied little prison of bone and skin. Thanks very much, unfathomable state of being.

           

            The nerves and strange sensation of impatient dread (like say, if you just couldn’t wait to smash yourself in the face, despite the fact that you have no reason to enjoy being smashed in the face) were probably from the weeks of work and stress that went into the gig. Ed scored his b*lls (bollocks) off (not in the Blue Peter sense), Trewin manned the crow's nest of the good ship aesthetics, and Jeb…I dunno…probably had something to do with the videos. You know what he’s like. I don’t think I’m being unfair in suggesting that Seryn and I did very little – though who knows how bad it could have got had those three grafters not had two lazy urchins to target in their private moments together? I’ve said it before; my purpose is to provide a common enemy, and thereby foster coalition between potentially disparate parties. If you don’t like that, well…

            Talking of parties…nah. Let’s not have that conversation. It’s always slightly cringe-worthy when someone talks about a after-party they went to when it mainly amounts to sitting on a chair drinking regrettable amber fizz (none of that, anymore, please. I don’t know why I returned to that place of worship – it’s bloody horrible) and choking on air thick enough to take a seat in the House of Commons. It’s cringe-worthy, I tell you. Especially when you consider the fact that the highlight for me and my little flower of a follower was when the host presented us with his collection of original Soviet pin-badges. I think the others were in the hot tub on the roof. Let that sink in, then see if you want me to tell you about the party.

            I thought so.

            So the party…

            And now I’m like this.

            Tim.

Everyone should come.

        So what did you do yesterday?

        Oh, right.

        Oh, yeah?

        That sounds awful. Truly dreadful. Why the heck would you share this drivel with me? How is a story like that going to enhance my life in any way whatsoever? I regret asking.

        WE, on the other hand (since you’re interested), did something that was actually worthwhile. Check it out:

I have better quality photos, but no others in which Trewin looks like a teapot posing for Debenhams.

          Yes, we practiced yesterday with the orchestra (or Phorchestra, if you won’t) alongside whom we’ll be performing on Thursday night. Here’s the gig. Tickets can be purchased by clicking through the facebook page. Click it. View it. Come. Strictly in that order. Please. If you do, I promise I won’t be as cruel as I was at the beginning of this post. That was an error on my part. I’m sorry – I’ve just woken up and I had a bad dream. We love you, really.

        Come.

        As usual, Jeb was on hand to film a little film (‘film’ is the one where the pictures move around on the screen; not reach from the page, envelope you, and transport you to something that’s not quite hell but personal revelation tells you is a much more torturous version of the kind of thing traditional depictions of hell singly fail to describe - that's something else entirely that a priest once showed me in a cave) so that film should turn up soon to slather a thin veneer of drool onto your chin.

        It was great fun to hear the tracks brought to life with that whole new element added. We’re doing three new ones, two of them never before gigged, each with strong orchestral accompaniment. There’s a whole bundle of new visuals created especially for the event, too. Lots of people have been workin’ ‘ard for this performance. We like the Soundscreen people. The venue’s much bigger than we usually play, too. We like playing bigger places.

        Thanks to all the people who play the little wooden instruments for coming along yesterday. We really can’t wait for Thursday.

        Whoever you are, whoever you know, please like and share the stuff we put out. This one should be a banger!

        Here’s that link again!

        And here’s a video of one of my favourite comedians, which I only found recently after years of convincing myself I’d seen everything he'd done that was available – hence my excitement and will to share.  It's actually been up for ages. I don't know how I missed it.

        That’s just what I like. If you don't share my tastes, that's OK. Just ask why I should share this drivel with you, and how it's going to improve your life in any way, whatsoever.

        Warmest regards,

        Timothy Dustless

P.S. That meeting I mentioned the other day? Don’t worry about it for now – just know that I’ve reminded you of it in order to tell you not to think of it. This will be on the test.  

An actual natural scenario.

I have a confession to make. I live a double-life. I am a double agent, trading secrets between the worlds of poverty and riches.

        My little dwarf of a bed-mate and I (and, I know, certain other members of the band) have regular dealings with her majesty’s Government concerning aspects of our personal welfare and our potential success. This is to the norm, and the presence of such a safety net and support network is not only welcomed and appreciated by us, but should be by all, for its myriad of societal benefits and the sense of solidarity for which it stands.

        Despite the undoubted best intentions (undoubted) of all involved, however, sometimes these systems will have cream-buns stuck in them somewhere – moistening the cogs and creaming up once creamless intricacies of previously perfect governmental processes. This particular cream, then, has been the subject of my morning so far, and has been for the memorable past. I am not, however, the party that dropped the bun.

        So, there is a stress. A direct, unnecessary and unexplained stress upon my very status as ‘person in a house’. Others have similar, politely unutterable problems.

       

        And so I take a step of desperation. A step that only the bravest yet most compromised agent would take. I maintain the cognitive dissonance of an imagined Reverend Charles Sheen, and draw from the completely imagined twin conflicting bank accounts of Jeremy Hunt, simultaneously. I make turncoat, if only in my head.

        Today, then, the other shoe in the bush on the other hand of Phoria is in central London, where we know several meetings of great importance to our future will take place. These are meetings that not only most bands, but most anyone-ers, would earnestly desire to be a part of not so much for any positive outcomes, but only to hear a yes or a no. Just to take part, as is the British way.

        Today, I and the rest of the band straddle both camps. Our bodies are weary, in all accounts empty, but our minds are flush with new ideas and avenues – new inlets of potential futures flowing all the time. Positive, moving forward – as much as we can, for now. We occupy both the bottom and the top; a coarse and inappropriate reflection of my favoured media.

        New material still coming. Promised soon.

        Little tastelessness.

        Tim

P.S.: Our next show.

(Stud)Hi-ho, (stud)hi-ho, it's off to work we go.

        So we’re building a new studio. ‘That’s good,’ you say ‘you need a new studio.’ Yes, we do. Thanks for understanding.

       

        Here’s a bad photo of it in progress:

There's no such thing as bad photos; just bad people.

        It doesn’t tell much, though I know Jeb was making a Changing Rooms style time-lapse film of the transformation of the once inhabited bedroom from a dirty, scuffed white to an all over shimmering, spectacular, incandescent…grey, which should soon surface. I, apparently, was the worst at painting the walls. No-one specified to me that ‘walls’ did not mean skirting board, carpet, and face. My artistic training consists mainly of drawing imaginary pictures of me going through an intense eight-week drawing class - none of which can be deciphered by the average huumun.

Trewin was very excited about the purple sofa-bed he managed to pick up for £30. ‘It’s a £1000 sofa-bed that I picked up for £30! Try it! Try it out! Mmmm. It’s awesome, right?’ It was awesome. I got paint on it.

So that’s where we’re going to continue work on the new EP - our new little studio set within the picturesque grounds of the Phoria househole. It’s brewing. It’s brewing nicely. There are songs on it.

And so far – no distractions whatsoever.

So that’s that. Life, it seems, is a river of pain with a jagged bed.

Shop here, then.

Tim.

       

Play along.

So I was asked this morning to organise a meeting between four of the five members of the band.

        Play this music while you read the rest:

        (Read it as me with a kind of gruff voice, waking up in my Spiderman bedsheets wearing a coat and hat and smoking a cigarillo. Just a normal day, in OTHER WORDS.)

        The phone called out like a lost child…lost on the streets of loser-ville. I’d lost her/it. I was lost. The sense of loss weighed on me like one of those fruit hats. Lost. Unfindable. This was a game of cat and sheriff, and I’d already lost. My favourite television show was Lost, but that’s over now. Misplaced.

        ‘Hello?’

        ‘Hello.’

        I was at a loss to place the voice. (I was blind.)

        ‘Who’s this?’

        The caller was Nancy Smithington – someone broad I once met down on the four corners of 4^th and 4^th. I was a perfect square, and she offered to look at me, dead, in the eye for a couple-a bucks. I didn’t take the deal. I saved her life that night. Since then she’d always called me, looking for a date. I sent fruit baskets.

        ‘Johnny, honey, you never cawwl me anymawer.’

        That bit is to give you a clue as to how stereotypical her accent is/was/she dies at the end of this story. Oh shit now I’ve given it away. Well, as they say, people always die.

        She read me a list of names. She told me what it was fawer.

        ‘Jawnny, baby, we need these guys. We got shit to do, honey. Get in touch wit ‘em. Call me back. I have diarrhea so I can’t dial the telephone.’

        Damn. Three names and a whole lot o’ nuthin.

        ‘Oh, and baby…’ she said, ‘come round soon. I miss ya.’

        I threw the phone out of the window. I wouldn’t be needing that again, unless someone needed to get hold of me, or I them.

        I swam down the rotten stairs of the building to retrieve the telephone. ‘If I’m going to call these people to get them together for a meeting,’ I said to myself, which brings into question the ontology of the ‘words’ I was using, ‘I’m going to need the telephone so that I can talk to them on that.’

        I called the telephone company to check that the phone was still working. They said they couldn’t tell, but that they’d send a guy round. I told them not to bother – Johnny Macintosh will figure these things out if it takes him all month.

        I called the first guy on the list. No reply. Typical. I called the second. I think he answered, but it sounded like he was just pumping air rhythmically through his lips. A secret code, eh? Nobody gets Johnny Macintosh like that. I slammed the handset against the table as hard as I could, and put it to my ear. He was talking, now. A little rough stuff from me never hurt anybody.

        ‘Little man in the phone?’ I said.

        ‘Hey Tim.’ It was Ed. I should have known.

        ‘Johnny Macintosh.’ I said.

        ‘…sigh. What do you want, Tim?’ Still talking in code. It was difficult to crack his nuts.

        ‘A meeting, little man. A meeting. Today. Skype.’

        ‘I’ll be there.’

        Dominoes. Life is dominoes. You knock one over, but if you set the dominoes up properly i.e. glue each one to the table so that it can’t go anywhere, then you’ve got to remove each one by hand, individually. It’s the only way to keep things tidy in this work-one-day world, and I was a tidy little man.

        ‘Seryn.’ I gargled.

        ‘Hey Tim.’

        I spat, and rinsed.

        ‘Seryn, we got a meeting. Nancy wants us.’

        I heard the sound of gunfire.

        ‘I’m a little tied up here, dude. What time?’

        ‘One-ish? Two?’

        ‘That gives me something to live for.’

       

        The sound of death filled my ear. The screams, the gunshots, the burst of explosions. ‘Secure the bunker!’ ‘Get the bastard!’ ‘You’ll never get your secrets back, Dr. Inchera!’ ‘Burden?! I thought you were…’ ‘…dead? Heh…dream on, Doctor…IN HELL! DREAM ON IN HELL YOU BASTARD!’ Bang bang bang boom. 'Oh Seryn, my hero!' 'That's right, Dad.'

        I sent Jeb a telegram. He replied and said it was fine he was just making some beans alongside toast.

        So, my job done, I had breakfast. Eggs over-easy, and a difficult cup of coffee. I squeezed myself in between the two panes of glass in my double glazed window, and wondered how I got into this shape. One woman, a list of names...

One name was missing, I knew that. He’s on the upper-South side, trying to conceive of opposites to left. Maybe he’s got the right idea.

        After all, as Nancy said: We got shit to do, honey.

Bloodworks US iTunes

Bloodworks UK iTunes

Phoria Store

Sept 5th: SoundScreen event at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, full audio-visual show w/orchestral ensemble.

P.S. Nancy dies of skydiving poisoning.

       

       

       

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.

Diary here.

On encouragement from others, I kept a diary of our journey through Europe. 

There’s an awful lot in there, as the trip took us up and down, through highs and lows, through frowns that broke our teeth and cheers that changed the direction of oncoming ships.

For now, I have here decided only to hint at portions of it. Still, that gives you all another reason to look forward to my eventual demise. The fully published diary will no doubt be offered as a free gift on the front of the Sunday Sport (by that time a well respected literary journal) on the day of my death, or at least mentioned in my obituary as some kind of lost treasure - the whereabouts of which will then be left to rumour and perhaps the subject of a new Indiana Jones adventure. (Hint: I’m going to protect the diary with a five headed AI double-cyborg Wolf-man, which can only be defeated by being buggered. That ought to teach Harrison Ford a lesson.)

It’s difficult to even try and fit those ten days (is that all they were?) into any self-contained…thing. There’s just so much there: not being listed here. I won’t do that. Instead I’ll take them as they come. Like a sexual health nurse.

Before that: the news. Three gigs this week: Tuesday, St. Wednesday, Thursday. Prince Albert, Old Blue Last, The Hope. Brighton, London, Brighton. Fun, Fun, Fun. We’re well up for it.

All relevant info, and the new shop, is all on www.phoriamusic.com, in case you weren’t aware. You are now, so there’s no excuse not to bookmark it and visit it every day, like a postman.

Day 2

Tuesday 6/7/13

Location: A small rest area beside the German Autobahn.

8:07 am

We have woken up to the sound of grasshoppers trying to drown out the rumble of the road. We stopped last night somewhere South of Frankfurt, the night-time’s driving becoming nothing more than a rolling screen, like a repetitious background from an old Scooby-Doo cartoon. I drove for about four hours – successfully resisting the right-hand urge to pull off into oncoming traffic…

Jeb and Rory have set-up camp outside. Jeb approached the van last night with a look of distilled fear in his eyes. A strange man sat watching he and Rory pitch their tents; one hand holding a cigarette, and Jeb insisting: ‘I know what his other hand was doing.’

8:36 am

It cannot be uncommon for people to wonder if certain public conveniences are more or less sanitary than having a member of the public defecate directly onto your face.

22:16 pm

Achingly tired. This may not make much sense. We’re in the van, in a campsite beside Lake Bled in Slovenia, drinking beer bought from the most perfectly situated branch of LIDL in the world. [photos will surface].

Slovenia so far has been…[the word ‘beautiful’ has been removed here] Mountains border your view at every turn. They vary from lush and green to sheer rock cliff faces, cold and cracked and aged. We drove through Austria to get here. This is so difficult to describe – partly because of fatigue.

I watched the landscape fold itself up like paper. The mountains, near and far, traverse each other as you pass them. The awe at each turn is the sense of creation on an industrial scale. The bridges rest on the legs of giants. Earth, above and below, shows off like an attention seeking child: petulant and resourceful. Grand, but nothing more than crude, quarried bumps. I felt as though I had been thrown into nature’s bosom.

We held our breath for 2km through a tunnel that burrowed underneath one of the mountains, gasping only briefly in a five second flash of light - as we returned to the vacuous caverns, lit through slits in the omnipresent green of the fir trees - to scream ‘WOAH!’ and then plunge back into a tube of sensory deprivation.

It was grand, and so inhuman. I do not know how to take it all in.

I feel like a bag with a hole in the bottom.

And that’s your lot for now.

Have a great day, whichever mountains you travel through in a van.

Tim