A Prague Spring

Full moon over Bohemia.
The overtime clock is ticking.
The first time I came to this Golden City,
I had blonde hair,
was dating a girl from Nottingham
and had only recently visited my first internet porn site.
These things I remember.
Not the bright lights
and coffee bars on the banks of the Vlatva
for me this time around,
but rather the constant re-jig of the Kino-flo
and the endless plastic cups of Liptons Yellow Label.
The director of photography is from Holland.
He's slow. I mean reeeeeeeally slow.
His name, and I kid you not, is Rutger Storm.
Last night, the French advertising agency
kindly organised a thai massage for me.
They told me there would be a 50/50 chance
of my masseur being male or female.
At a little after 9:30pm,
a burly man called Michal knocked on the door to my room
and asked me to strip-down to my underwear.
Turns out he wasn't even from Thailand.

The 4-Legged Groove-Machine

Between the ages of about 18 and 22,
The Wonder Stuff were far-and-away my favourite band.
They were the reason I first grew my hair long
and wore ripped-jeans.
I slept on railway stations for them
and even, occasionally, affected a Black Country accent.
It was The Wonder Stuff that keep me sane
during the long bad summer
I spent trapped on a holiday camp in Suffolk.
I listened to them, religiously, at least once a day.
I put pictures of them up on my chalet walls.
Their drummer, Martin Gilks, died last Monday.
He was 41. That's all.
He died in a hospital in Tooting, South London -
from injuries sustained in a road accident.
Strangely enough, I was in Tooting that Monday night,
and we'd been talking about The Wonder Stuff,
while we sat on a tour-bus style coach trying not to fall asleep.
I'd passed around an old photo of me from 1991,
in which I was putting on my very best Miles Hunt sneer.
Remember kids;
motorbikes aren't big and they aren't clever.
They are dangerous. Really fucking dangerous.

http://www.room512.com/

15 Years Of Coxon

From where I'm standing tonight,
there don't appear to be too many grey hairs in Graham's barnet.
Not bad for a man of his advanced years.
As he quickly dispenses with the trademark spectacles
and rips his way through a back-catalogue
of spit-and-sawdust
garage-punk tunes concerning love and loss,
I try and work out how many times it is
that we've engaged in this two-way transaction over the years;
him up there on the stage
and me down here in the mosh-pit.
I can't be sure,
but it must be getting on for double figures now.

www.grahamcoxon.co.uk

No Sleep Till Croydon

Over 4 long and cold
nights in deepest darkest South London,
a titanic bunch of people,
(some in spandex and some not),
reach, breach and vanquish
the pain-barrier again and again and again.
Like a proud child with a wind-up clockwork toy,
for large swathes of this somnambulistic endurance test,
I can but sit back and feel rather humbled at quite what
my desire to put words on paper have set in motion.
I hereby salute you all for your
Goodwill
Endurance
and Commitment To The Cause.

www.blakesjunction7.com/wrestling