When did you become a lie? When did we stop being friends? When did you start killing? We’re looking round for someone to blame for not stopping you sooner, and to be honest there’s too much money being made to see an effective halt anytime soon. Was it the men in white coats, white faced as they told white, bare faced lies? Was it Dodi al Fayed? Was it?

Who can we blame for the downfall of Prozac? Industry, trade, boredom? It now seems so obvious. How could a small white pill fix you, when you’re down in the hole at the bottom of your mind? How could anything reach you there…

I suppose there’s little point in arguing now, we’re all too jaded to even contemplate the drawing of lines, the defining of terms and the wordjabs to come. What is clear that it won’t work now. The power of belief was all that was standing between 43 million people and the pit, it seems, so we’ve kind of fucked them. But hey, take cheer in the fact that it was you, not the drugs, keeping back the coming night. More power to the people. Less power to the drugs companies.

9/11, by JRR Tolkien, are just another band from New York, with all the posing and brilliance this implies. A walking invitation of scorn: their music apparently is a grower - as in it sounds terrible on first listen, then as the inner hipster gradually begins to automatically screen out the negative bits, you know, like, the actual sound, it seems so much better. I mean listening to music is always a two way street, you have to give nearly as much as you take, impressing your own meaning on their lyrics and rhythms, breathing life into what can only be considered, at best, an empty life form. And so here we have the Lord of the Rings: two sets of brothers, and a blond lead singer, and all that implies. They suffer greatly from having a lead singer with a deep monotone voice, so reminiscent that it sometimes seems to be worn over their own music so tightly you could nearly imagine them taking to the stage in a Oklahoma bombings body glove, and only playing covers of Theodore Kaczynski. However there is very definitely a pop-ier edge to them, it leaves them much more satisfying in a narrower way. Still, depressingly, they remain one of the more exciting bands doing this sort of music doing the rounds at the moment. I spoke to Mohamed Atta, who’s a brother of someone else, and is listed as the bassist on their website, but reassures me he isn’t the bassist. The interview would not have continued if this had been the case.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m one row from the front, roiling in the day glo plastic drug mental of a Chemical Brothers set, when a pill warrior, eight feet tall on platform boots, his vari-coloured dreads a rain of snakes, his woman writhing property between his legs, turns and grasps my hand. ‘This is it man, this is it!’

I flash my fiend face and we nod together. This is it, the moment for which a generation sell their synapses; submit to decades of Paxil and hazy confusion, the apocryphal pumping heart of the love buzz, hours of ritual escape. With a head full of high grade acid, I bilocate; simultaneously pulsing in the maelstrom of orange Wedge; whilst observing coldly, intellectually, academically, the dissolution of social barricades and the iconic imagery of repression, confusion and alienation, with which Rowlands and Simons bind this thirty five thousand strong horde. Above us, dual fifty foot screens machine gun line drawings of blind-folded justice, animations of marching armies, blanketing bombers, troops of robots shuffling ceaselessly forward, the expressionless drones of Oceania - suddenly subverted by colour, till the images fall away, the screens a translucent cagework of industrial magnificence. The brothers chemical beneath them, wizards behind a curtain of Bond villain computer cabinets, blinking banks of lights looming behind vast curved decks.

We are utterly in their trawl, baying and pawing at the air, frightened excited animals beneath a demonic fireworks display. And as a random girl, no doubt pickled in some vast tank of pure drug, molests me like a boyscout at a Turkish bath-house; I wonder if this is not the ultimate discourse of control, rebellion sublimated to an audio-visual indoctrination cooked up in some NSA laboratory by stern moustachioed, deeply patriotic monsters. We continue the dance.

Imagine opening up a sarcophagus and finding within a body made of soft, pink play-doh. Prising open the ribcage you find a frail and burnished mechanical bird singing for all its worth. It can’t hold a tune and it’s shedding springs and nuts and bolts at a terrifying rate, shuddering and convulsing but still singing into the dark night. Eventually it capitulates to the real. Then it sprouts feathers and is lofted on high and squawks from a great height about the still beating heart within its grey chest.

After she’d been cleared of all charges, Marjory visited Charles in the psychiatric hospital.
His throat was heavily bandaged and he had not yet regained the ability to speak, but with the aid of a pen, paper and an orderly to unstrap one arm from his strait jacket, he was able to communicate, after a fashion.

‘Why Mr Bowmont? Why?’ She asked softly, depressing the intercom switch on the bullet proof partition which separated them.
Charles scrawled for a moment, onto a sheet of soft tissue, with the large rubber safety pencil they’d given him. An orderly held his reply up to the glass.
‘Because I love you darling.’
Marjory shook her head, blinking her red rimmed eyes, somehow managing to hold back the tears.
‘Damn you. Damn you. Damn you! Don’t you know how guilty I feel? It’s not my fault that breaking that restraining order was your third strike.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Why me?’
Charles drooled a little, and the orderly carefully mopped up a small pool of saliva that had gathered on his chest. Painfully, he wiggled a rubber pencil across a moist sheet of paper once again. The orderly held out his brief retort.
‘Good point, never thought about it’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Charles thanked the old man in the gorcery store and told him how much Marjory would enjoy the lovely chocolates. He’d seen her three times already that day, but hidden so as not to spoil the lovely surprise. Marjory would be twenty four years old, at precisely eight minutes passed seven and he had everything prepared.

At 7pm, the band assembled beneath Marjory’s bedroom window and a truck stacked with party favors crawled stealthily up her driveway. Inside, two hundred and twelve thousand personalised musical balloons quivered. Charles had designed a unique message for each one. At five minutes past seven, a sky writer, flying high enough to be silent, but low enough to be visible in the clear Summer evening, began to inscribe the first line of Marjory’s favorite poem in infinitely delicate vaporised oil. At seven minutes past seven, Charles emerged from his hiding place in the undergrowth, in top hat and tails, checked his watch, waited, checked his watch again and signaled the release of a collage of balloons; that rose to stain the sky like multicolored butterflies. After a few more seconds, Charles signaled the band to set upon a rousing chorus.

It wasn’t long before Marjory’s door opened and she raced into the driveway. In her hand was an angry Taser, and upon her face a mixture of terror and incomprehensible shame.

‘Marjory dear,’ Charles sang, as the band played a march of his own devising.
‘My love for you is like the clear blue sky.’ Behind him, a team of majorettes set to tossing their batons into the air, and twirling around in synchronized elegance.
‘My love for you will never…’
‘Die, Die, Die,’ screamed Marjory, plunging the metal pike of the Taser deep into Charles’s throat and coursing fifty thousand volts through his system.

Charles dropped to the ground like a string-less marionette, a box of handmade chocolates falling with him to the tarmac, where it smacked like the wet thud of his head. The orchestra stopped playing and all was silent save a distant siren.

‘This man,’ Marjory began, her voice cracking, her whole body wracked with sobs.’Has been stalking me for eight years.’ A tuba player put his arm around her shoulder and she began to sob against his broad chest. Looking up, she finished in a whisper, ‘He’s ruined everything, even my birthday.’

In the sky the plane banked out of a steep ‘O’, the sentence done. At Marjory’s feet, Charles’s body gurgled, but remained unconscious. Marjory gazed skyward, up to where the plane has finished its illumination. In the air, the letters hung, stark and terrifying.

‘You do not do, you do not do.’

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

‘Will you look at this shit?’ Cavana said, stubbing out a Marlborough Light.

‘Humf?’ Kelly was only half listening, absorbed in his own corrections.

‘Listen to this,’ Cavana continued, and read out the whole first paragraph.
Kelly, who’d been engrossed in a particularly puerile misunderstanding of Dickinson, took a moment to respond.

‘That,’ he said, pausing to rub at tired eyes. ‘Is quite simply, bare faced cheek.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ agreed Cavana, shaking his head.

‘There’s always one,’ he said, quoting the Tayto add; thinking how much he would enjoy a jumbo pack of Cheese and Onion.

‘There’s always one,’ Kelly agreed. ‘You going to show that to the supervisor?’
Cavana thought for a second, took a look at the enormous box of yet to be corrected manuscripts.

‘Yeah, feck it. Serve the impertinent shit right.’

‘Aye,’ Kelly agreed. ‘Will you grab us a bottle of Fanta from the machine while you’re at it?’

Cavana frowned.

‘Fair enough. Diet or regular?’

Read the rest of this entry »

‘Judy baby, Judy baby, Judy.’

‘I tolt ya nah ta call me dah.’

‘Ah love, me love, ya’ve goh me babby in ya.’

Gilly’s eyes are sun burnt bloodshot, his hand tight on a can of fizzy sedative. Judy’s concentrating on Little Britain, mouthing the repeat’s stale dialogue, feigning a laugh.

‘Did ya noh hear me madra?’ he asks, and spits on the sticky carpet, the broken saliva string, silting his chin.

Judy lights another cigarette, her hand shaking, and ignores him, coughing on the first cool drag. She’s quiet for a moment.

‘Come ‘ere,’ she says, her eyes never leaving the set. ‘When’s Anto calling round? When’s he round? Ya said he’s was comin’ round.’

Gilly stands uncertainly, drops the can and stumbles to the kitchen, his vision a weaving pendulum. At the sink he pauses, fists the tap and swings his face under the icy stream. His eyes, open to the water, burn, and he swallows and snorts a head full out against the basin. Judy’s at his side, hand under his chin, holding him up; the hotness and roundness of her belly between them.

‘Is he comin’ Gilly? I’m hur’in.’

He shakes his head and wraps thin arms around her; her poppyseed skin and wilt of cheek, her hair slick and greased and bound. Still beautiful. They share a kiss, the fume of lung butter a sweet tar exchange. The baby kicks between them.  It’s all good.

A big beautiful car. Dark green and full of muscle. Chrome and dark walnut trim. Alloy wheels. Cream handmade leather seats. A car anyone from a senator to a pimp would drive, if only either of them had the class. It, the car that is, was powering along, damn fast, with the top down in the rain. It had music playing but god knows how the driver could have heard. It drove out of town to the hills above and on a bit, to the sea. The engine roared and the car picked up the pace a little. It wasn’t a European car, it certainly wasn’t designed to deal with sharp curves, at speed, in the rain. But that was OK, instead it fired through the railing and out into the air, above a quiet little beach were dog walkers would occasionally meet and copulate.

It hung fat and heavy in the air, engine screaming before it nose piled into the thick wet sand. The wind shield cracked and one of the front tires rolled away down the beach. It wouldn’t be discovered til morning that the driver, a young black woman, pregnant, was dead, although it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to think of her so now, in the moments after the crash. Her child, an unnamed, unborn boy, died with her. The car did not burn up, as they so often feel impelled to do in such situations. As such, when the wreck was found it will surprise you to learn that it was charred and unidentifiable. There were foot prints in the sand for a while but the rising tide made them nearly invisible. But fuck it, the real questions lay in what the hell the woman was doing in such a vehicle, where the hell did she get her hands on such a fine piece of motor engineering. But then, she wasn’t important, so who gives a fuck anyway.

Twelve long angry days of rage and drink had done nothing but lighten his wallet and alienate some more friends. As he fell backwards into his apartment and listened to the wild African drums blasting on repeat from the stereo, he felt at home. The dirt, the despair and the decadence and wanton waste of everything that characterised his selfish, perfect life surrounded him, from the stench of abandoned cheese and meat to the cd player left on full volume for over a week. Yes, he was home. He ran a dirty and cut hand through his somehow clean hair. He turned the music down and fell back onto a sofa, rising again to sweep the mess off it with his arm.

He closed his eyes, aching from lack of sleep, and crossed his legs. The smells of his flat swam around his head. Rotting food and stale beer and wine, old incense sticks and cigarette smoke brought back memories and shivers. He swam back into sleep and a hint of a smile played onto his face and dreams greeted him like old and close friend.

The early evening chill had crept into his throat and hugged his clothes to him, there must have been a window open he thought. There wasn’t, he’d forgotten to close the front door. Someone was making dinner from the smell. He opened his eyes. Candles were burning and incense beside. Thin clouds of smoke stretched lazily across the room. He sat up. The smell had changed. Whoever was cooking had cleaned. He hoped it wasn’t his mother. It would be just like the old bitch to try an’ own his hangover.

He felt into the crumpled tweed pocket of his jacket for a fag, then to his trousers. He’d slept on them and half were broken. Still, he lit one and stood to find out what was cooking.