As my dad’s crooked hand is pointing out, we have two newly recorded songs up for free DOWNLOAD.

One is called Staffa & Fingal. The other is called The Old People.

You might already know them, but they sound much better now. And they are both correctly spelt this time.

We hope you enjoy them very much.  If you do, why not pass on our website address to a loved one?

Look, we have a new EP up for download called Internecine.

It relates to our recent album The Third Person in various ways. Think of it as its little brother or sister, perhaps.

Click HERE to own it.

Productivity,

productivity, productivity.

Good news! We’ve more or less finished the new album, and will put it here for free download at some point next week.

In the meantime click HERE to download a song from it, called In Your Eyes.

An Epiphany

She leaned right back against the car, placed her palm flat on the roof. It was toasty warm. The sun was beating down on her and the car, and she was truly happy with the hand on the roof, and her mind wandered and thought up strange scenarios, and they were filled with people she’d never met. She stayed like that for minutes.

After a while a man came up to her and asked if she would like to join a group, to move into the group, to make a radical break with the group. He looked really young, seventeen maybe, and he had very long nostrils. She stared into the nostrils, kind of up his nose, right into his head, and shivered in the heat for just a moment.

“Are you waiting for the street-car?” he asked stupidly.

“Nope,” she said, tapping the car roof, “this is mine.”

The man carried on: “Are you from England? I love your accent. Are you from London?”

Yes, yes, she nodded, even though this was a lie, but what did it matter, so she just said: “Yes.”

“That’s great,” he said, although he didn’t look like he thought it was great. He looked very serious and unpleasant, and she couldn’t keep herself from staring up into these long nostrils. And on he went about the group, and asked her to join, and she said “Nope”. He reluctantly left. No way, she thought, and he disappeared around the bend.

But, you see, the next day she changed her mind. It was strange. After the man had left her, she had put her hand back on the roof, but the evening was coming, and it wasn’t as warm, and it had started raining. She drove back to the motel, through Decatur, through raindrops as big as boiled eggs. The whole night she only left her room once, to get a drink from the vending machine, and she had raced across to outside the laundry facilities where it stood, and raced back, and her heart had pounded. And somewhere along the line she just changed her mind. Her back had been sopping with big raindrops, her t-shirt felt oily. She felt cornered and panicky. Maybe that was why. The next day she came back to the same spot and had the same conversation with the young man, but this time she said: “Ok”. And she was then in the group.

A Pincers

One thing the group insisted on was that a new member exchange gifts with them, as an act of mutuality. And the next day the head of Human Resources came up to her and presented her with a two pronged tool, almost like a pair of pliers. She looked quizzical and the man paused for a while then said incredibly quickly: “They’re a pincers”. It sounded incongruous, but was nevertheless important; a single article embodying something collective. And in return she went to her quarters and drew them a picture, the first thing that popped into her head. She drew a group of dodgy looking men. It was titled: “ROUGH-LOOKING JOKERS”. Make of that what you will, but it didn’t go down as well as it could have with some areas of the group. Human Resources said “Obliged.” And that was it.

Urban Renewal

Then they went north and rented out an entire floor of a block on 125^th and Maple. They became involved in the Urban League and chained themselves to the front of the Sojourna Truth development.  They held placards: URBAN RENEWAL HAS DESTROYED MORE LOW-COST HOUSING THAN IT HAS CREATED. The media and the digging machines were absolutely deafening.  The group won a moral victory, but were ultimately powerless. In the evening  well-wishers left flowers outside their apartment. The group declined to collect them but  wrote an open letter to the city, a radical gesture:

JOIN US

And people joined. And they were each presented with a pincers, and in return gave hastily thought-out, awkwardly executed gifts. And each time the man from the group waited and waited and blurted out: “Obliged.” Some new recruits were better cooks, and the group started eating really well, better than ever before. People would tell the cooks: “This is seriously good.” And the cooks would say: “Yeah, whatever.” It was a strange atmosphere, and they were strange people.

Cointelpro

Moving west, they liaised with the COINTELPRO operation headed by J. Edgar Hoover, and agreed in a shrugging kind of a way to help fight ethnic insurgency. The group divided into various chapters, and for months on end infiltrated groups deemed counter-productive to the national interest. In Buffalo they planted heroin on a Black-Arts Bookstore owner called Martin Sostre, and he went to prison for a seriously long time, for forty years. When he got sent down one member leaped off the sofa and punched the carpet in the expensive hotel room,  dust bouncing up into his face, shouting with joy: “Fucker!”. This was uncharacteristic of the group. But they ate increasingly well and shrugged more and more.

Disgruntled FBI members joined up without even being asked, completely bewitched by the grace and indifference with which the group conducted themselves. Hoover and President Nixon ate with the group, the latter declaring that if not President he would join up, no hesitation. He said the food was fabulous, and that the group symbolised the country taking responsibility for itself after a decade in a shit-storm. He got very little kudos for saying so, and left in awkward silence with Hoover. On his way out he stooped and said, curiously: “You can take that anyway you want.” He sounded incredibly like Nixon at that moment. The group watched him hobble out towards the limo and wondered what had gone on in his childhood. But ultimately they had little time for sweeping statements, and certainly weren’t interested in getting in bed with the state.

The New Left

The very next morning a small proportion of the group flew to Algiers in Algeria to set up an International Chapter. The long and short of it was that they spearheaded a diverse and global movement of class antagonists that would later come to be known as The New Left. They demanded that the liberal rhetoric of the postwar era be backed up with concrete reparations for past (and ongoing) injustices. One group member wrote an anonymous article for a Martinique journal called Tropiques. You know, it was warmly received, but ultimately preached to the converted.

Scandal

And all this time a tyrannical system of violent, sexual and psychological abuse was orchestrated within the group, between the members of the group, upon all members. This would all come out in a wave of publications at the beginning of the 1990s.[1]

Incident With Light

Right at the end, literally hours before the major arrests, one member of the group, Seb, had a visceral and personal emotional experience. In a hotel room, in the Austrian capital, the group had barracked itself inside. The media and the world were outside with cameras and police helicopters and breaking news reports. Seb sat on the floor in a dark corridor alone and watched a series of lights move in through the window at the end. Resting his whole back against the bare wall, he angled his face directly into the beam of a cold, bright, incredibly white light. He was thinking about the end, and the corridor smelt of mildew, and he could feel the nature working upon the building and in himself.

And he opened his mouth and the beam filled up his entire head. He was illuminated. He really felt illuminated. He opened his eyes and the beam burned them horribly, but Seb shook his head and did the opposite of sensible and opened them wider. Again, he very definitely felt upon his skin a deeper red colour move up his right side. It was deliciously warm, heating his right side, his back still cold against the wall, two opposing temperatures working slowly, ridiculously slowly on his body. The red light moved up onto his face and finally into his right eye.

He breathed in a big way and felt an erection and exclaimed: “Ohhhhhhhhh.”

And there, where the red and the white met, with the cold around the back, a vaguer yellow emerged, running slowly down his nose, oozing from the middle outwards. As in coming from somewhere inside of him. I think he was synthesising these lights and producing his own - an inaccurate synthesis, a wrong answer, but something that was strangely meaningful. Because everything was coming to an end.

And finally a flickering pin of blue that ignored him and moved rapidly down the dark corridor to reveal a girl who was on the verge of tears. They were both revealed by the various beams, and revealed to each other, and they looked at each other for a moment. And they felt so completely indifferent, so perplexed by the situation, so confused by themselves. And against all the odds they felt a profound, emotional kinship. Then everyone rushed in, and they were shot, probably.

The End

So it was a strange paradox. A mixture of personal and collective experiences, and protean politics. If I really had to describe the workings of the group (and I wouldn’t) I’d say they were built around the artistic technique of montage.

Carpe Diem, Leeds, 16/01/10

1. Next Exit

2. In Your Eyes

3. Englishman In Corridor

4. Hugh Person

5. Third Person

6. Landmark

Album coming week after next, promise, swear down.

And so, snow. Everywhere. In the local park a rather productive gang have managed to roll a 5 foot tall ball of the white stuff into the beck at the bottom of the field. It’s sitting there quite happily in the freezing water, potentially the biggest glacier currently in West Yorkshire, soaking up silt and turning brown, like kitchen roll dipped in dishwater. The more it snows the bigger its brilliant titanium white hat gets.

Oh, and we had to cancel our only gig in the past six months. Apologies to those would be attendees.

You may well be wondering, ‘What on Earth are you playing at? Where’s my album?’, and that would certainly be understandable, if a tad pushy. Well the answer is, the truth is, we’ve finished the mixing stage. That’s almost definitely true. Now we’re awaiting word on mastering. This shouldn’t take 4 months.

But it probably wont be done before the end of this ice age. At least, not until after all the glaciers have melted.

This is my date - December.

I’ve said it now. Under promise, over deliver.
But now - a link!

1. Somehow, England destroyed the Aussies at the Oval and regained the Ashes.
2. Rhode Island rediscovered how good Chicken Kievs are (where have you been?)
3. We finished recording our album ‘The Third Person’ in a structured yet relaxed environment.

Being mixed and mastered, by someone with a degree in that kind of thing, as we speak.

Look here. (Try and forget everything about this video apart from the music in the opening minute)

Taphonomy covers ep = HERE

Self indulgence see below.