Anti-Folk 2006

We arrive on Tin Pan Alley
with our bellies all full of burger and milkshake.
The singer from David Cronenburg's Wife splits his trousers.
Mister and Mrs. Dufus party-on like it's 1969 or-some-such-shit.
J.J. Crash proudly wears
his burgundy Jack And Jeff Lewis T-shirt.
More than half the members of Milk Kan fail to show.
Filthy Pedro's wisely remembered
to pack his devil-horned gimp-mask.
And throughout it all,
the 12-Bar's famous old forge (1635) looks on
in silent judgement.
I can't think of a better £6 I've spent this century.

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.

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