I went to see Batman yesterday. Marylou and I and some of the Moran circus troupe I was telling you about. There are bloody hundreds of them and they’re all geniuses in their own cackly way. Anyway Head Moran Cait, treated the lot of us to Batman at the Imax and afterwards to a japanese Restaurant for a slap up Hot Sake session.
Look at how many there are! That’s nothing; there’s at least another thirty of them back at their tent.
I was very excited about the film. I’ve been a big Batman fan for years and I thought that the first batch of films with Keaton, Nicholson, DeVito and big Arnie were an insult. Sure the new films are dark but that’s the way the comic started out, before it was corralled into the war effort and later after a few desperate years of Bat Mite and punch ups on Mars. IT’S THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE!
We rode the tubes, falling out at Waterloo and then falling straight into the nearest food and booze establishment which happened to be the Royal festival Hall. I had a cappuccino, friendlied up with a cheeky whisky while Mary had coffee and some kind of Humous Focaccia. The Imax was packed and everybody seemed to be eager for the film to start but just as we were about to find our seats, CALAMITY! Some bloody alarm goes off and we’re told to leave the building. After standing outside for fifteen minutes or so we’re ushered back in and in no time we’re in our seats looking at a screen that is bigger than Jeebus. usually at this point would be tunneling head first down a massive bucket of popcorn but due to ’staff shortages’ there was concessions stand so I had to make do with half a bottle of warm water.
There was only one trailer but oh! what a trailer it was. The Watchmen film looks aces and I would implore anyone who hasn’t read the greatest, most culturally significant graphic novel ever written (and drawn) to check it out.
Then it was Batman and it was fantastic. I’m not sure which bits were the 3D bits, if any of it was, but it didn’t matter. Heath Ledger is, even after all the beautiful corpse hype, a brilliant Joker. Unhinged, funny and completely psychotic, the Joker of ‘Arkham Asylum’ and ‘Killing Joke’. Unfortunately the alarm went off a few times during the film and the lights went on and off and at one point the film stopped for five minutes. All of this was annoying, true, but I didn’t see the point in the anger and rudeness that I witnessed in the lobby later on. I didn’t want my money back (not that I’d spent any), I’d gone to see a film and I saw it. I don’t like ‘Rip-off Britain’ any more than you do but I don’t think what happened here was anybody’s fault.
We strolled along Southbank as far as Tooley Street where our restaurant lay. I had a red duck curry washed down with a couple of bottles of Tiger and a few tumblers of hot Sake which warmed my insides and rounded it off with more coffee and whiskey. Again this was all paid for and I thank all that is magic for having such beautiful, generous friends. After Keystone-esque capers on the tubes we finally arrived home and sat outside for a couple of hours singing songs and pretending to understand what Cait was talking about before wending our weary ways skyward and to bed.
Superheroes are, on the main, a rather dull bunch and none duller than that goody goody mummy’s boy; Superman. What a snooze that alien is, everything in his world(s) fits neatly into two categories, ‘GOOD’ and ‘BAD’. There are no shadows, no darkness. His character is wooden and a penny tossed in wouldn’t have far to sink. His alter-ego Clark Kent is a bumbling suit with self image problems which, presumably, is to deflect our curiosity about his real self but I don’t see why he needs to bother; as long as he keeps his glasses on nobody will ever guess that he and Superwuss are the same bloke which says plenty about the intellect of the inhabitants of Metropolis especially Lois Lane who knows both men intimately and still has no idea as to his true identity.
As for James Bond, well who wants to watch what is primarily a twelve year old boys wet dream. At least Carry On films had Kenneth Williams in them. I’ve never read the books so I can’t comment on their literary value but the films are scoreless draws on a freezing weeknight in Bournemouth. The acting in the last one was so bad that the director might as well have held two bits of two by four with ‘James Bond’ written on one ‘Boobs’ on the other and waggled them about (but not too much, don’t want them stealing the show). I knew what was going to happen when i saw the poster. Actually I also knew what was going to happen in Batman, after all it’s been happening for almost seventy years but the difference is that I care about what happens to Bruce Wayne and to Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent and The Joker. Empathy kids, that’s the difference… real people. Ok, real people dressed up as a bat but some of us need to hide behind a mask in order to express ourselves.
In Batman’s world nothing is ever as simple or as straightforward. His ass is torn. He is convinced of his mission, to rid Gotham City of it’s dark and seedy underworld elements and yet without them he does not exist. It’s as if every criminal, rapist, mobster he beats up/puts away is Joe Chill (the mugger who killed his parents) but what happens when they’ve all gone, when there are no Chills left? There is little doubt that all that grief and rage powered intellect and muscle would turn it’s destructive force inwards. So he needs them, especially the Joker, one of the greatest mythical characters of all time. With his burning intelligence and his first in Capebait Psychology from the Arkham Asylum he holds up a mirror for Batman to see what he really is; a tragic figure wearing a bat costume who shouldn’t spend so much time down the gym and who should maybe learn to relax a bit more. C’mon Bruce, Eat a Peach. This just winds up the Bat even more because, deep, deep down (and that’s a penny you wouldn’t hear land) he knows it’s true. He knows that all he’s done is thrown his lot in the with the crazies, oddballs and costume freaks, that innocent people have died simply because he exists.
He also knows that he would increase his effectivity ratio by getting Alfred to locate a really big BATGUN so he could really go to town on this house of mirrors Joe Chill infinity collective that stain his beloved streets but then that would make him as bad as the very people he has pitted himself against even though everyone else, including the few people who know his identity (how many is that? three? four?) wish in their hearts that he would. As Bobby Seale once said ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and he knew a thing or two about politics and what constitutes a fair fight. If, as Bruce Wayne so often says, Batman doesn’t need to be liked, he just needs to be whatever suits Gotham’s needs at the time, then he should get out the gun catalogue and splatter a bit of claret about the place sooner rather than later. It’ll make him feel so much better.
I guess I was always gonna fall this band. As a devout disciple of Melancholia in most of it’s forms, the uplifting sadness rung from the lusty throats of these young, bearded Americans with their premonitions of death, their graves, Red Squirrels and Blue Ridge Mountains has captured my heart so completely. Mary and I have a copy in the van and as soon as we set off it’s on. A couple of months ago we stayed in Norfolk for a week and hung about in ancient graveyards, walked through the poppies and crabbed off the pier and it was the Fleet Foxes album that was our soundtrack, so aptly suited to the ghosts, half seen in the twilight; and the Windmill, cheerfully sturdy beneath sixteenth century skies.
We drove down to brighton to watch them play, drank beer on the seafront (well, I did) and walked through the lanes. Afterwards I bumped into three of them and tried drunkenly to trick them into coming out drinking with me but I was a wee bit slurry and was soon having my head bounced off the kerb by their driver. They are a powerful band live, full throated and sweaty and my only disappointment was the absence of ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, a song that I will take to my grave.
The album landscape puts me in mind of Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ where open fields, towns and strange meetings dominate and yet seem intangible, ever shifting, glimpsed through the miasmic cobwebbery of the vague. Lyrically, I find only secrets and puzzles, songs about dead boys and Meadowlarks drift past, like a scene taken from Alexander Sokurov’s trippy film, Russian Ark and at the end I’m none the wiser about who’s dead, who isn’t or who is related to whom. The melodies never stay around for long, there’s always something else about to happen and as a musician I love the way they work their chords. The whole thing makes me want to try just a little harder.
I put my order in for the vinyl the week it came out on eil.com and Amazon but nothing’s come through yet. I hope they haven’t deleted it already.
Look at it. A face worse than death. That’s what rampant capitalism looks like, my friends. The pressure up there defies my somewhat limited descriptive powers so I’ll say only this; it will take you and yours down, like a malevolent gravity clocking in at four hundred thousand Newtons and rockin’ concrete kecks. Look closely though, my brain is working out percentages and share options at unimaginable speeds. My wires plugged hard into the matrix, my eyes seek out only what they can get and my hair is big. Be in no doubt brothers and sisters, my hair is huge.
Worse still, the war on poverty (mine) is being fought on two fronts. My hangover was shocking. The previous night Marylou and I had driven down to Brighton to watch The Morans (circus troupe, aka The Guys, collective noun = Cackle) perform in a play they had written themselves called ‘Love Tournament’which was very funny. So funny indeed that I heroically attempted to drink myself to death in the pub later. We didn’t arrive home until gone half four and I had to be up at eight to make beautiful things and put them into bags. Mary was shattered, at seven months pregnant a girl needs her sleep so she got her head down for a while on top of the bubble wrap under the stall table while I slept behind my sunglasses.
With only seven or eight weeks to go before the due date, we still haven’t found anywhere to live. We discovered a new development in Bow opposite the sprawling foetus that is the Olympic Village. That was one of the incentives to living there; to watch it grow and come to life and then crumble and become a ghost. A bit like a Victorian Novel only with Javelins. We managed to miss out on a couple of large spaces and were let down on another. The stuff we do at home is now verging on the light industrial and we need space. What estate agents refer to as ‘roomy’ and ‘massive’ and ‘large’ bears no relationship to reality whatsoever in London. We have found a place that is perfect for us but it involves loans and commercial leases and viaducts and the council and ‘premiums’ and surveyors. We need to settle soon and start concentrating on what’s going to happen in October. Marylou is fine and well and the baby is kicking seven bells out of her from the inside.
I’m still writing songs but I can’t see a time when I’ll ever finish them let alone record them. As for the current recordings, check out the ‘News’ section.
As most of you probably know I recorded an album earlier this year in Cardiff with producer Charlie Francis and a few friends. What with all the other things I’ve been doing I just haven’t had the time to work out the form in which it will be released.
One of the things I’ve been looking at is Bandstocks. A new model which bypasses record companies and allows the music fan (I’m guessing that’s you) to invest in the artist (that’ll be me). There are already a number of these things around but the difference is that this one is A+R’d. Bandstocks have to want you to do it, it’s not for bands who can’t get a record deal. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.. I’ll post more info soon.
I went to see Batman yesterday. Marylou and I and some of the Moran circus troupe I was telling you about. There are bloody hundreds of them and they’re all geniuses in their own cackly way. Anyway Head Moran Cait, treated the lot of us to Batman at the Imax and afterwards to a japanese Restaurant for a slap up Hot Sake session. 
