Rock's Backpages

~ Chester Whelks tunnels deep beneath the sarcophogus of the Rock Writers' Mausoleum.

To celebrate Manchester Library Card Holders’ newly granted access to Rock's Backpages, a wonderful online repository of a wealth of material dating back to the birth of the Rock, the Roll, and the writing thereupon (but deserves special condemnation for containing not one article on The Daddy of Rock N’ Roll: Wesley Willis), a select number of diligent Manchester Library user-musos are gathered in an oak-paneled study room in the City’s makeshift Library in Elliot house on Deansgate, for a pub-quiz style competition. Sans alcohol, naturally. The idea behind this event presumably is that the loser could always bolster their woeful knowledge by accessing the aforementioned website. Leading proceedings is Brother John Robb – author of a Demi-Century of articles to be found on the site in question, on subjects ranging from The Roses to Rapeman and My Bloody Valentine.

The backpages of Rock magazines were always to my mind, the preserve of frustrated musicians seeking to make contact with likeminded individuals, isolated by geography or a fierce, alienating taste. While not, I imagine, the intent behind the title, its still very apt, considering music writers are supposedly just that: Frustrated, failed and embittered musicians. Jealousy is their Muse. Source of both their scorn and fauning. Her untouchable honeydewed mammilla swings pendulously, each extreme of a nipple's swing ticking away the seconds of their wasted lives, agonizingly out of reach of the frantic suck of their pucker. Not Robb, who has gorged himself to succor at bosom, bush and backdoor of the Floosie-Muse - a Renaissance Man-Jack of all trades.

Maybe I’m in the wrong job?

John Robb? What a job…

…but which one?

He does it all, having earned his Punk Rock chops in 1977's The Membranes. After their dissolution he osmosed his way into writing for seminal music mag SOUNDS, before forging Punk Soul combo 'Goldblade', for whom he acts as bug-eyed, hoarse-throated vocalist. He's also recognisable to a portion of the docile populace as a regular Talking Head on self-indulgent TV nostalgiagasms such as 'I Love The…(Past)'

He's a Mental Gentleman and a Rock N’ Roll Scholar. A riddle wrapped-inside an Enigma, and a Quizzical wizard, but tonight, he's pointing his throbbing, knotted wand squarely at us...

...but first, if I might be so bold as to foray into an alien vocation, I’d like to step off the beaten track into intimidating wilderness (where still looms the odd Barn casting a shadow the colour of dried-up blood) and impress upon you a poem.

THE 'GROWING-OLD' RADIO SHOW

A November 9am is worth just as much as a summer's 6,

Or at least, the skies plough their clouds with a similar, if chillier, indifference.

While last night's poos commute through the sewer…

I sit-up from slumber and enmesh myself headfirst in the switchboard-limbo of a morning radio DJ.

The delicious intern screens me like she did the comb segmenting her hair at 5,

Ironing-out any personality chasms that might house unforeseen twitches or nits.

A Tourette’s sufferer stutters at her inability to p-p-p-put him on the Nun-fucking Air,

Forgetting she’s in her Hitler-position based on knitting-pattern and fringe-skirting logistics.

("Of course I've fucked some ugly girls, the good-looking ones are too much hard work.")

Quarantined in the Leonard Cohen introspection of the anechoic chamber of a telephonic waiting area,

I beatbox-compete with my own tachycardic biorhythms,

Until the paterfamilias of the wheels of steel eventually lets me out and welcomes me in:

“Long-time caller, first time listener...

Even as a toddler I promised I’d never be here, providing the likes of you with your microphone goo,

The whooping cough of your infantile, mongoloid colic.

Using my aimless AM to populate FM radio with banality chatter for the work-bound jerks.

The grumpy sun screaming out from behind lung cancer cloud cover promising that, despite jobs to the contrary -



I was alive.

                        Dancing about Grave Architecture: “Fuck Art. LET’S DANCE!”

Look at these people: They don’t know either. 

Rock’s Backpages crystalizes a time when Music Writing was an invaluable source of information for bands that couldn't get mainstream airplay or TV time, gaining notoriety instead via reliance on fans’ mix tapes, festival attendance, resulting word of mouth. Now our information is trickled down the thighs of the go-to guys – from the Pitchfork, the Stereogum, disseminated by Twitter and cast to the digital winds. Rock’s Backpages is a familial Mausoleum for the Golden Age of Rock Writers, resplendent with various crypts, niches and sarcophagi, and I heartily recommend it as an indispensable reference pension.


But remember to siphon some life through your pipe.

Easter, Outer Dark + Cyril Snear - Dulcimer 12/1/12

“No sooner is Christmas in the bin than we’re thinking about Easter.”

The pine needle outlines tell me the bin men have finally disposed of the Christmas tree corpses that have besieged my street for a week. I’m Febreze-ing my bollocks-off this frosty Friday the 13th, because as chance would have it, I’m sat only in these pants, and last night saw fit to damn them to the stench of ‘Kaltenberg Hell’. Why don’t they arbitrarily randomize the smell of Febreze? This stink is an insinuation of filth. Much the same as Hospitals seem like they’re frantically distracting your olfactics from their clandestine death.

It’s refreshing to be away from the inner circle of the City Centre’s scene & herd – the overambitious bollocks of atrocity boys and cupcake-baking girls…but then again, this is the bohemian outpost, of which I’m swiftly reminded by a streetlamp in knitwear as I make my way down Wilbraham Road.

Dulcimer is dully simmering as a band sound checks upstairs, attempting to approximate the date (“1-2…1…1-2″) and Thursday night pints are sunk in its cosy corners amid handovers in conversation. Bypassing the vacant ticket table at the top of the stairs I inadvertently eavesdrop on the start time being pushed back to 9 0′clock from the stated ’8′. When I come around to the idea of descending for last minute cigarettes and drinks, I think it best to introduce myself to the guy now manning the desk, who identifies himself as Paul from ‘Outer Dark’, and offers an outstretched hand along with his thanks for coming down. My cynicism insists this is an act of pandering to ‘the press’, but is seemingly sincere enough to make me hope his band isn’t shit.

Having minus’d my life by 11 minutes while Kitty Saros was at the bar pledging her allegiance to the cirrhosis sorority after pleading free drinks from the bar after some unrepentant cunt vanquished her vodka, its time for another insinuation of villainy as we rendezvous with…


CYRIL SNEAR

 

“This song’s called ‘My Pet Goat’”.

Rather than the menace suggested by the all-but-naked, pink skinned, cigar-chomping nemesis of Evergreen Forest, the now audience-plumped upstairs is enveloped by the harmonic fretboard slaps and sit-atop-clobber-box of tonight’s stripped-down Cyril Snear, swaying with the mystical whimsy of a time signature reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ with similarly earnest, if less adventurous, vox frosting-it. Skinny Arms gee-tar man ironically has a ‘Fear and Loathing’ tee on, with it’s Steadman illustration of our narcotic-Don Quixote & Gonzo-Sancho Panza cannonballing toward the rollercoaster ride of the undulating gradient of Vegas’ skyline, which is at odds with the temptation to cosy-up to bobos in the redundant bass drum’s muting duvet & pillow combo.

OUTER DARK

Outer Dark look like Middle class white guys who profess to like Tom Waits, and shake their flaky heads at sacrilegious Cookie Monster comparisons. The opening song is a vociferous behemoth reminiscent of Mastodon, with intermittent funky Jazz schisms and underlying Pearl Jam lamentations. On the whole, they make a sound that simpletons think-of as ‘Grunge’.

A bandaged hand whose brother I shook, strangles the fretboard and neck of a Gibson SG. Funky stop/start nipple-high bass pulsations are wrought by a guy that looks like Jeffrey Treblezine to whom I owe a month-overdue review of The Fall’s ‘Ersatz GB’ and is freaking me out. Everything slides into a Roni Size avalanche of overabundant beats, before cascading into ‘Morning Bell’ skibbidy-bop catch-up drumming. The arpeggiated guitar riff Goosy Ganders upstairs, downstairs, while the keyboard tinkles like streetlights on rainy Rhodes.

‘Outer Dark’ aren’t my cup of tea, but tea isn’t my cup of black coffee. Outer Dark aren’t as outré or noir as their name suggests, but frenetically caffeinated enough to be of interest…

"WEIRD ERA, ARE YOU PLAYING SOUNDS FROM THE OTHER CITY?"

…having said that, while they’re winding-up their set, I’m distracted by Adam from ‘Weird Era’ who is front and centre, mentally dissecting them for himself. I’ll spare you the metaphorical cock-suck I undertook and just tell you that Adam says: Yes. Yes they are.

EASTER

Like Jesus, I’m late for the start of Easter. While I’m wondering if that duct taped guitar strap on the lead singer’s Fender Jaguar is really necessary or just a tokenistic Indie Rock affectation, stage left’s Merzbow T-Shirted guy Greenwoods his guitar into a Three Mile Island of a sonic cacophony courtesy of what he’s learned from his Japanese noisemeister idol, undercutting the coolly crafted Indie Pop the song once was, and everything vapourises into cloudy screams reminiscent of ‘Yrself Is Steam‘, until I no longer give a fuck about the duct tape’s integrity, as I’m blown away. I don’t know what else to say. Easter held my attention hostage with unknown melodies underscored with skilfully invoked explosions, ploughing tinnitus into us as guitarist and bassist physically shifted their most unwieldy speaker to the front of the stage as the showstopper.

PrettyfuckingWOW.

Easter is, like, a festival of Death & Resurrection which has been supplanted by chocolate eggs, which presumably are a metaphor for the shit we feed our children, i.e. the fairytale of a well meaning Biblical hippy whose depressing execution needed a happy ending tacked onto it so we don’t get all Emo over the futility of our existence.

‘Easter’, resurrected my faith in Rock N’ Roll or something…that’s all I’ve got for my showstopper.

Hey, it’s better than saying I was chained to a radiator with a stiletto in the testicles.

But I did spill beer on my leg, honest.


Photos: Kitty Saros

Review featured on Manchester Scenewipe

Riot Hit Gig : R. Stevie Moore, Manchester 2011

R. STEVIE MOORE : THE CASTLE, OLDHAM STREET, MANCHESTER, WEDNESDAY AUGUST 10th 2011

The gig of the century, that never transpired, through a riot-hit Mancunian mist.

Spreading the good word in dirty-earnest.

If the theory of Parallel Universes has any validity, I can guarantee you, you’re in the wrong one. In a certain groove of the musical Multiverse, R. Stevie Moore is a name as familiar to your echo-self as any of The Beatles, only in that reality, these Beatles-of-a-lesser-John performed in obscurity, before calling it quits. Luckily, there exists in our reality the stubborn endeavours of a Bona Fide Genius, who for some reason missed the fame train. Or rather, it missed him. 

The Beatles analogy is maddeningly valid, and R. Stevie Moore has written more songs of optimum quality than had all four been as prolific as an amphetamine-addled Daniel Johnston in the 1980s, for double the decade they dominated. Like Johnston, Moore is regarded as an Outsider Musician, but for no other reason than he has predominantly home-recorded his material, and is dizzyingly prodigious. Moore’s mental state is not in question, though after nearly 40 years on the periphery I’m not sure how. 

His father Bob Moore was a respected musician in his own right, as a bass player most commonly associated with Elvis Presley & Roy Orbison - but also with Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr, Andy Williams and Quincy Jones to name but a few. Such a talent-gasm must have sent shockwaves reverberating through Bob’s seminal vesicles considering R. Stevie rivals them all.

From the moment I heard ‘Melbourne’, I knew I had found what I was ultimately looking-for.

Little did I know how completely nut-punched I would be with every subsequent song I heard. Every fucking song I heard on ‘Phonography’ sounded like a classic from a parallel universe. ‘I’ve Begun to Fall in Love’ is just scrotum-shrinkingly good. Devastatingly incredible.

Like the prequel to ‘Caroline, No’ by Brian Wilson, (via ‘Don’t Talk, Put Your Head On My Shoulder’ maybe), it is so innocent, so beautiful. so DOOMED. I can’t help but contort my face with every chord-change to represent the particular feeling it evokes, as it meanders so unexpectedly into each incongruous, but perfect chord. Such a weird uncertainty… his voice seems to be so defiant, and sure of how righteous his love is for Carolynn, as it fights against the lugubrious, mournful-sounding chords, that seem to simultaneously echo, and negate the feelings that formed lyrics.

Shortly after discovering his music I embarked upon a flight. It had been a while since I’d done so. It’s not natural, and anyone in their right mind would have to get their mental doormen in-place to stave-off the panicky disaster-bastards from bleeding-in, hooting and gnawing at the console, their shit-filled pants spilling out undetected among the stench of the apocalyptic in-flight meals. My particular mental-employees would lullabye his songs through my mind, and I found I was afraid to die only because, at that point - I had just three of his albums.

The feeling I was enveloped-by, in the midst of discovering his music, was nothing less than love itself. My girlfriend caught us. One day while puttin’ up the groceries, she turned around to see a most peculiar look on my face. The expression spoke of a man who has indulged in pocket-Billiards to such an extent, that his face betrays his secret tournament to the watching world. I was so enraptured by the choice of chord change on ‘What’s The Point?!!’, she thought I’d friction-singed my intimates.

So selfish am I, that upon discovering music that I so abruptly crumble-to, my instinct is to keep it to myself. But in this case it became impossible. That selfish desire fell-away the more blank faces I encountered when spreading the word. If you stumbled across a cure for cancer, could you keep it to yourself?

R. Stevie Moore might not cure cancer (at least, he’s not been widely regarded-enough yet to be put to the scientific test, or exposed to a large enough demographic), but if you had the misfortune to contract-it having been lucky enough to have discovered him – you’ve had a good run.

R. Stevie Moore has written more than enough music to last you a lifetime, there’s just something about it that sets my soul aglow. 

During an evangelical bout of fevered letter writing in 2009 which included the director of ‘The Devil & Daniel Johnston’ Jeff Feuerzeig, ex Public Image Ltd Bassist Paul Jones, and BBC commissioning editors and their minions, I spoke to Half Japanese’s Jad Fair, who theorised that R. Stevie’s relative anonymity was down, in part, to a reluctance to play live.

"I think part of the reason he isn’t better known is that he hardly ever plays out. I did 3 shows this year on the same bill with him and he sounded superfine.”

                                                                                    Jad Fair, Half Japanese

Well, now he is, on Wednesday he plays Manchester for the first time, and it’s your chance to play a part in a long overdue and deserved ascent into recognition. You’ll either come and be enraptured, or come and be able to say that you were there. Either way, it’s definitely not something you want to miss.

His forever-indebted Mooreon,

Chester Whelks

"A Scally-Glastonbury" : The Manchester 'Riots'

TUESDAY               AUGUST                 9th                   2011                      15:38

There's an ominous* hum emanating from the imperceptible vibration of the nervous girls that last night piped-up thinking they could see smoke plumes erupting in Gorton from their City Centre flats as London burned, when cockeyed racist potato Nick Griffin aped mate Jeremy Clarkson by Twitter-predicting Salford was scheduling a descent into Hell. The famously endearing, absurd-sounding Manchester Evening News sandwich board posters are bizarrely generic this afternoon.

Where ordinarily they would read something like:

TRAFFORD MAN'S

BANANA PLANS

HIT SKIDS

Or

LEVENSHULME

PENSIONER'S

HEDGEHOG

ADVENTURES

They today matter-of-factly say:

2 FOR 1

AT

CHILL FACTOR-E

and

FANTASTIC

10 PAGE

SPORTS

PULL-OUT

Like some sort of offering to the looming Manchester Scally-Kraken.

Mancunian Twitter users are rocking in the corner, chanting the mantra that 'it won't happen here', or quoting Tony Wilson’s edict that ‘we do things differently’.

Mark Duggan did NOT fire at police. "If he did have a gun – which I don't know – Mark would run. Mark is a runner. He would run rather than firing and that's coming from the bottom of my heart" say his family who are understandably really upset and maybe a bit biased. Bringing to mind the kind of time a gyppo-kid drives his hotwired joyride into a motorway tunnel wall because he can't see over the steering wheel, and his family say he was 'no Angel' but had a heart of gold (cue slow-zoom into image of kid frowning over his shoulder in some rain slicked November Car Park with flames behind him and a tyre-smoke Halo crowning his slowly grinning face.)

But none of this matters. None among the bikeriding Nike Ninjas swarming on the City Centre know who the fuck Mark Duggan was - or his best friend, 23-year-old rapper Kelvin Easton, known as 'Smegz', for that matter, who died a similarly ignominious death being stabbed by a Champagne bottle in a Club earlier this year - they've just been bombarded with images of their scum-buzzard southern brothers helping themselves to their blackened-heart's desire and have decided they fancy a bit of that.

When I was in my first year of High School, I remember pathetically attempting to remove the swoosh from some expired Nike's in order to lash them onto the pair of unbranded 'market-movers' my Mum had procured me for PE, so I could survive High School.

On a Market Street corner, sovereign-ringed fingers cradle a virulent knacker-sack in tracky pants, while the other hand's thumb flicks the mounting ash off the end of a B&H.

It's always been hard explaining irony to a scally. Even when they're calling YOU a tramp while trying to take your money or stuff.

"Drop us a dollar, Yo?".

Grafts

They aspire to that skewed view of the American dream, leap-frogging work in pursuance of the wealth society denies. Stood on a train platform after the riots, a friend of mine said he overheard some scallies discussing the ‘riots’ and referred to the various acts of scavengery as ‘graft’.

The night of my 18th Birthday, we're sitting in the corner of the football field of my old High School smoking weed at 11pm when three figures gradually materialise through the blackness. Two years earlier in the alley that ran behind us, a couple of my school friends had been pummeled onto crutches passing a gang of scallies (then ‘Townies’), the hereditary enemy of us ‘Moshers’. After an animosity stand-off, we all relax and begin "chatting bare maca" apparently. Their leader reveals an admiration for Pink Floyd, and espouses a belief that we cultural sub-divisions are basically all the same - just going about it in different ways. After about an hour’s good natured maca-chatting, one of his companions slips into an unguarded-account of how his cousin suffered the fairly unprecedented misfortune of an inguinal hernia at just 8 years old. In his limited physiological knowledge, he misinterpreted the ruptured stomach-muscle’s protrudence as an ascended testicle, and when talk turned to how he’d given it a curious squeeze - all hell broke loose.

Leader leaps to his feet and punches testicle-toucher, sat cross-legged, backwards into grass. Testicle-toucher does all he can to stand before getting kicked, trainer full in his face, a dew-soaked rubber sole squeaking off his teeth sending the amateur abdominal examiner backwards into black, while his leader anticipates and follows his trajectory, landing a few more merciless kicks thudding a hollow ‘THWOMP’ into his ribcage and a final sole-imprinting stomp onto his once-capped head.

Leader turns around and sits back down with us, seeming slightly embarrassed, and holds up his hands while looking down in his lap. Leader apologises, saying:

“I’m sorry about that…

I’m not a violent man.”

–      causing uproarious laughter: half of us genuinely driven into fits, the other sickened beyond THC appeasing.

He was the nicest scally I ever met.

Words come through all fluhmplubbled 100 yards away as a defiant whimper limps through profusely bleeding teeth…or at least the spaces where they used to be. Leader immediately drops his skins and legs it after defiant punch-bag, sending him fleeing completely.

The demographic of Negative Alchemists: those who manage to maketh Gold the most scrubberish-looking substance on earth. They’re the ground-up chum of the upperclass. They’re Jonesing for your sports goods, athletically debasing their incongruously resilient, fertile bodies, and breaking all the rules no one bothered to set out for them. They're your bedrock, and you need them to stand upon to keep your head above the crud.

Look at the stores that were looted (NOT the stores that were damaged - in most cases they just saw glass and smashed it) no one was looting Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles' from ‘Travelling Man’.

What happens in X Factor’s absence

And fuck Liam Gallagher's ‘Pretty Green’ - that sort of pandering to white trash aspiration is only slightly evolved from what motivated the looters.

It's undeniable there was a valid flashpoint, and an equal and opposite reaction, but everything that rippled northward was opportunistic Commercial rape.

Millionaire ex-pat Hollywood-ponce Russell Brand looked-on from Beverley Hills, then wrote a stirring account of a time he used to exorcise his Middle Class guilt by getting involved in protests, squaring up to his Riot-Geared peers.

Their power was illusory. They convened on Cities just as they knew everyone else was leaving, knowing there was zero chance of succeeding with the general populace around lest they found themselves on the receiving end of a bloody good ear-clipping. They would have been totally outnumbered. A clusterfuck for the Police, and a social and moral hierarchical bukkake for the average man, who would no doubt have fought back. It comes down to freewill. There's no Devil to punish you at the end of it. If you so desire you can take the bag off a bleeding geek’s back, but heaven or not we all intrinsically know it isn’t necessarily fucking ‘soul’ to do so. It's up to us whether we adhere to what we have universally decided to be right and best for everyone, meaning 'fuck-with not, lest ye be fucked-with'.

Clearly these kids have been brought up with the greedy creed: 'Do unto others, before they do unto you'.

While hand-wringing social commentators seek a measured explanation, the Ghosts of the Peterloo dead watch these gluttonous opportunists run amok.

Its important we apportion our disdain some free-reign, otherwise how else are we going to be motivated to change the cause of it?

*= Point at which I lost my target audience.

On Having One's CAKE & Eating It.

You bastard hack. My, oh my, but that's a bad title. Lazy. Like you've been waiting for an opportunity to use it…

“But it really happened!”

Well, nearly happened. 

The charismatic John McCrea is explaining how this ‘evening’ is going to work as the band ready to ease themselves into the 'INTERMISSION'.

"'INTER-MISSION'. It's such an adult thing to do. We take our time, savour the first half, take a short break and reconvene with renewed vigour."

"YOU CAN HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT!" - it occurs to me to say at that moment…

But I stop short of shouting it. Maybe it's my internal critic? More likely the prohibitive bar prices in this newly refurbished Ritz (lowest priced pint £3.90), which are a far cry from my free pint of Hoffmeister and £1 bottles of beer when I came here as a teen in the 90s for Monday'sfamed 'Alternative Night'. We all complained about how shit it was. We all returned the next week to say the same.

Though at some point, I obviously stopped before the night did, as I've not been back here since before I got into CAKE, which was admittedly pretty late. I used to get here early, before 10pm in order to quaff the gratis Hoff and boost my confidence in pursuance of the girls. Once sufficiently emboldened with additional Pils, I'd sit in a corner looking miserable.

You know, really putting out 'the vibe'.

I find my corners of choice have been walled-off when entering The Ritz for the first time in 11 years. Though it still has the majority of its former glory in situ. The balconies, bars on either side and, contrary to popular belief the fabled dancefloor which remains as bouncy as when my teenage feet in dervish Converse scuffed it-up in the '90s (My assumption as to the proliferation of this bit of misinformation is first-timers attending this resurrected Ritz and finding an actual dancefloor rather than the trampoline they were presumably expecting.)

I got into CAKE with their 'Comfort Eagle' album of 2001, immediately taken by the deadpan hilarity arising out of the absurd self-reverence of the arrogant, album-opening 'Opera Singer', the Commissioning of a Symphony in ‘C’ by an Austrian Nobleman, or ‘ClassicalGas’s Evil Twin, ‘ArcoArena’ which sounds like the kick-ass opening of an Educational programme from the late 70s/early 80s they made you watch at school, from which the theme was your only enduring impression. CAKE needn’t kick the shit out of you, opting instead for funky bass, the odd whip-cracking “H’YA!” underscored by Mariachi brass. 

In the live environment, as with his recorded delivery McCrea takes a stepping stones ‘cross the stream approach, seeming reluctant to land his vocals on the spots you’re willing him to, instead letting the music almost pass him-by before casually relinquishing his grip on the lyrics. Similarly tonight’s setlist, being the ‘Evening With’ that it is, plays it safe refusing to abandon the sure-footed retreads of old favourites - after the hilarious and agonizingly drawn-out ‘WAR’ theme from Rocky IV, CAKE finally sidle on and launch into Willie Nelson’s ‘Sad Songs & Waltzes’, McCrea weaves in and out of the stage’s placement-indicating ‘painted tape’ (careful to avoid an incongruously planted sapling sat at the front of the stage), throwing his white gloves into the crowd as he kicks the show off proper with ‘Opera Singer’ before the band hand over co-writer credit of their ad hoc setlist to the temperature of the room. Before the break McCrea divides the crowd into two sides to provide backing vocal duties for new album’s ‘Sick of You’, even going so far as to supply each side with ‘their motivation’ as we sing the freedom decree: “I-I-I-I’m gonna fly away” to each other’s respective oppression. While probably an audience participation skit fine-tuned over months of this over a year-old tour’s is tonight given a special significance after today’s ‘Occupy Wall Street’ ejection from Zucotti Park.

Which leads us into the break (which is where we came-in).

In their own divisive show of oppression, the Ritz bouncers funnel those of us wishing to leave for piss or cig respectively, out of two dedicated doors. Us smokers are subjected to a negative nightclub-entry ‘one-in, one-out’ scenario – corralled and packed like a fresh 20 pack behind the foil of the metallic barriers on the pavement outside, meaning we miss the resumption.

Tonight’s second slice of CAKE…Come on, I’m not really going to do that, give me some credit!

“But you did! You’re saying you’re not going to lapse into cliché, BUT YOU ALREADY DID IT!”

YOU CAN HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT!

While the first half was given over to indulgence of their most recent record, the second half is peppered more heavily with firm favourites, which paradoxically proves far less entertaining than the midpoint when McCrea gives away the tree to whoever can correctly identify it (Answer at bottom of page*) under the proviso that the recipient agrees to replant the tree in a place it is likely to remain in perpetuity, and photographic evidence of its progress regularly sent in to a designated page on their official website.

“H’YA!”

ǝǝɹʇ ɯnld ɐ :ɹǝʍsuɐ*

Photos by Kitty Saros