Sweat mother of christs ma. put this album and lie back on your bed. make sure it made- the duvet and all in place, your pillows fluffed. take off you shoes and lie down. perhaps you’d like some tea, or as i prefer a jd and coke. now lie there sipping. hopefully its a sunday morning and last night was a big one- but it hasn’t hit you yet and the music carries you through the night like some extended deathbed flashback. its going to be alright, you no matter, you know.

There is some of that is brilliant, but fuck it so much of it is toss. nearly as bad as smile, what a crock of minge. that tubby drug hoover wilson is wildly overrated. whatever, laters.

A neo-post-punk Swanseaic masterpiece reviews retrospectively the paramourous longings of rock’s grandilloquent past. Dylans ovre is comprised primarily of records, although he has occasionally (most often unsuccessfully) strayed into the realms of the LP. Long admired for his popularity, here the artist finds a place in music never before inhabited, a desert hideaway of broken shuffling Americana, a Hillbilly highway of draughty hungry road music. Chords like savage coyotees pound, resound and blite the bloated corpse of the American dream. Wet fat polps of smegma. This album has a sound as difficult to describe as words are easy to waste on futile lyrics. Dylan drives through the mountains of his past, grunting his mouth words into riveted bundles of sinew, almost jazz, like some feable weak kneed dark hued fish food silting endlessly to the floor of a broken tank. This is music reimagined. This is flawed imperfect soundheaven. This is a windvane of endless unforgiving yiddish charm. This is a sentence. This is the most insightfull thing ever written about Dylan. This is a review.

You hold her hand in the waiting room, nervously venturing glances at the other hollow eyed denizens of this last desperate prophylactic. She squeezes your hand, nestles her head on your shoulder, achingly trusting, depressingly young. You’ve taken her out of school today and you hide that old familiar hard under the bustle of her mini, imagining tomorrow, fat black bags and a crooked walk giving her away to the sixth form girls, who’ll quirk a grimace and cross their legs at the memory.

Somewhere far away they call her name and she reluctantly climbs from your lap, turning to kiss you once, full on the lips, as you look down on two fat brown areolae, nestling beneath her tube top, like hot bronze coins. She stands up, suddenly defiant, heedless of their judging glances, walks tall as she can to the ward doors, hardly looking back. You’re so proud of your little girl.

A mike, discarded and abandoned, a fish hook swinging in the half light, the subtle gloam of Debrah Harry’s cigarette. The band have scattered like the ashes of the ghoul of Nancy Vicious, she is alone. One hand rubs along a furred belly, whilst one arthritic claw works the controls on a a worn VHS of Karen O’s minimalist masterpiece ‘Maps’, as she mouths ‘Cunt’, ‘Cunt’, ‘Cunt’.

From behind a velvet curtain, a great bloated Bowie begins a deep slow moan. Modern Love indeed.

A vast metropolis under the surface of the earth, teeming and rustling, heaving and bellowing, and from it steps a man, a hero. The crack pipe clicks against the lighter in your shaking grip, comedown a rabid waking dog that paws the cat flap of your conscious mind; afternoon the harsh bleak vision of desperate extremity, unseemly burrowing through odds and ends, friends pockets and the back of seats, anywhere for loot to cross your crackman’s filthy palm; with luck the sweet fever dream of that hot rock’s crackle, the harsh chemical cinnamon of that first desperate drag; the numbing clumsy refuel of the bowl, soft fingers flowing in and out of sight. The album ends.

Enough already with Johnny Cash. Yes, Hurt can make me weep like a child uncontrollably, confronting my brash immortality with the horrible truth of my mortality. And much of the America recordings are very good. And even this album is good. Brimming with menace, honesty and energy. But come on now lads. Yeah its a great story and you can hear every twist and turn in his voice, but the America recordings should only have one cd long, there’s a lot of shit on them. We’ve all got a bit on top of each other here. Yes he’s a legend, but he’s dead, so fuck him. Stop with the wanking over his portrait. And Walk the Line was terrible. I don’t want to hear him anymore.

I spent some time in India, as you may well know, and on one occasion I was taking a train across the desert between Jaipur and Jaisalmer. Anyway it was a long journey, and although you could get some tea every time the wallah came round, the hot sweet tea full of Cinnamon and gloves they do pale impressions of over here, but you couldn’t really get any food you risk eating even 6 months in country. I’d brought a load of biscuits and sweet bread with me and shared it with the guy it the seat next to me. He was class. Real class. A tall warrior, he was a commander of an elite border unit with 18 years experience fighting the Pakistani’s, the Kashmiris’s, the Moaists near Bodguya and the Chinese in Ladhak. He was proud of his service to his country and had the medals and scars to prove his dedication. Anyway after about 4 hours on this train we were in the middle of the dessert and the train slammed on its breaks and a shrieking later we were all picking ourselves of the floor. The day was starting get hot and as we looked out the windows to our left, the woman who had remained silent through out the whole first part of the journey and was sat next to the window to the right let out a scream like I haven’t heard off the silver screen and then something else from the movies she fainted. Not quite so picturesque, she had vomited all over herself. As my friend ran over to her, as the rest of us sat glued, he too vomited.

The reason we had stopped was the driver had seen something on the track next to us, and that was ow next to us. And one by one, we stood to look, and if we didn’t vomit we paled. I feel those who were ill immediately were lucky, they had nothing to bring up later. We were the first train to pass this direction that morning and hence were the first to find the man tied to the tracks next to us, his head and legs destroyed by a train in the night. His brains were spread, still recognisable, about the whole length of our carriage and mess of legs and knees about the same, his shoeless feet were gone. There was a wild dog eating some bit of leg until a guard form the train shot it with a shotgun, making another whole mess. The soldier, having vomited shouted for us to move to the other side of the carriage away from the carnage. He then spent the next 6 hours whilst we baked in the sun and the smell of the corpse began to permeate the whole place and thick high sweet smell I’ve never been able to forget, and one by one those of us would still could went to the door of the train and were ill. The hero tried to keep us all amused, some of us were fairly hysterical and I’d been listening to the Requiem For a Dream sound track for about an hour at this stage and was about to move onto some Aphex Twin, so you know i wasn’t in anyway right.

So he started to tell everyones fortune. He was an armature, self taught chiromancer and he had us all relaxed as we could be, telling us all of our fortunes and misfortunes. He took my hand, one of the last, and ran his hard weathered fingers over it, he took out a small compass and made some measurements. And wouldn’t say any more.
Later, when were getting off the train and I was nearly blind with tiredness and dehydration he told me what he saw. I’d be dead at 45, and would be killed by a train, and there would be blood on the tracks.

Miguel was not a star of his own accord, he was plucked from the streets were he had lived for the first 12 years of his life and sent into training. He was chosen for his unique bone structure and tight round buttocks. For the next 32 years he was trained in dance and mime. He would never sing the songs that made him famous. This was done first by a choir of 15 Peruvian girl Scouts and 2 classically trained tenors from Argentina. Later, as computer technology progressed they were replaced by 4 sega megadrives selotaped together and a guy called Keith, who knew how to make it sing like an angel. When this album was released in 1980something Miguel was already the star of fraud group the Jackson five. Now 44 years old he wanted a solo project. Well as solo as having the singing done by, at this stage, 17 different people can get.

Although much of Jacksonez work is being reappraised due to his recent legal problems, this still stands towering above every other release of the 1980’s. Towering like a tall fat guy over a burger on the ground. Thats big. Track after track. Just like most albums in this manor, in fairness.

Still, although he’s had a lot of work done, he looks well for a former Mexica male prostitute in his 70’s.

A lull in the shelling, I hold Ted’s hand, stroke his whitening cheek. Ted Pepper has been more than a friend to me, more than a lover, more than a brother, more than an anthropomorphic condiment, and here he lies pumping the last of his vital juices into the stony gray soil of Flanders.

Deafened by the shelling we can only mouth our affections through mouths of broken teeth, I lean forward and place one slow long lick upon his cheek. I reach down, feel something wet and hard, and start to stroke; too late I realise I’ve groped a loop of fat intentine.

In years to come I’ll meet two US presidents, invent a revolutionary herpes cream, and even own a privative digital watch, but never will I feel more privileged than today, hands in my mates belly, bare arse skinned from the shelling, gay under a coal shed sky.