'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

If you haven't been keeping up with Luke Haines' recent ventures, he's just released 50 albums. Which so far as anyone can work out are 50 versions of the same album, Outsider Music each recorded live in one take, and each costing £75. I don't have it, no. There's various Bill Drummond-style rhetoric about this restoring the sanctity of the physical album &c, but given the old bastard has always made an art out of wilful perversity, I suspect a large part of it is making a few grand quickly while seeing what the fans will put up with. In much the same spirit, last night he played the new material live at the Hoxton Pony, a venue whose name is in a sense honest, but perhaps a little too disguised by the Cockney rhyming slang. The intro tape doesn't seem to be able to stay at the same sound level for a whole song, and two of those songs are by the Doors. And the support is a berk who is apparently from a band called Silvery, and who seems to have been booked just so Haines can remind himself how much he hates Britpop because his stuff sounds like something which steve586 would refuse to play at Nuisance. Haines himself is sounding a little odd on account of some missing teeth, and horribly plosive because he's doing stuff with the mic which even I know how not to do. It is, in short, not the ideal setting. On top of which, as Haines says while introducing the song about a friend who met Alan Vega of Suicide, "the new songs were rather like the old songs". One song, more recent even than the Outsider Music stuff, is introduced as part of a forthcoming concept album about seventies wrestling, and concerns the domestic arrangements of Kendo Nagasaki. From anyone else, you'd know that intro was a joke. But from Haines? (Suggested heckle: "Play the one about the seventies!")
Haines is in that spot a lot of artists get to where they've found their territory and, if they do get any new fans, it'll be through a critical rehabilitation rather than a sudden shift in the material. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I was listening to the new Twilight Singers album on the way to the gig, and there's not a surprise on it, but that doesn't stop it from being the third best album of the year so far (not the faint praise it may seem in mid-January, the H Bird and British Sea Power records are excellent). But if these songs really don't get any wider release...well, most of them I won't honestly feel as gaps in my life, the exception being the brilliant 'Enoch Powell'.
And then we get the old songs, and a reminder of why we put up with all this because yes, the man has written several dozen absolute and eternal classics, and here's a selection. Most terrifying is to hear 'Future Generations' in the company of a fan born in the nineties*, proof that Haines was, as usual, right when he first sang "the next generation will get it from the start".

I hadn't even been planning to go to that show until mid-afternoon; I had other plans, and I'd assumed it was sold out. And by that point I'd already reached my standing goal of doing at least two things per day beyond pootling around on the net or reading a comic or two or other minor stuff; I'd filled in my tax return, and I'd finally watched Videodrome (which is basically just 'Blink - The Queasily Sexy Years', isn't it?). This in spite of having developed a problematic addiction to "I am the man who arranges the blocks" after having heard it at Bright Club the night before, with which I had thought I should re-familiarise myself given I'm performing at the next Wilmington one on February 15th.

*edit: Actually 1989, I am informed, and unlike Wikipedia I trust people to correct their own biographical data. But I feel the point stands.

Even though I didn't stay quite to the end, Friday's Black Plastic felt epic. I think this may have had something to do with listening to the Afghan Whigs on the way there (and then not getting horribly lost because this time, dudes, I remembered to check the full address). Possibly the drunkest I have been...since the creepers incident, in fact. Earlier that day I had climbed my first tree since then - one which had creepers, creepers I carefully avoided. Because my back is fine now, and as soon as possible you've got to get back on the horse. Or tree. But not back in the tree on a horse, that's a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

On Saturday, I felt somewhat puzzled by the Guardian having a big article about Momus and giving Gyratory System, whose free show I am attending on Wednesday, Single of the Week. I also watched the new Peep Show which, if it felt like it was moving a little fast at times both for comedy (surely there was an episode's worth of laughs in Mark as the boss?) and plausibility (could a multinational cut the British office loose with such disregard for redundancy laws?), was still Peep Show, and thus a sign of life in British comedy, which I needed. First, I'd recently attempted Home Time based on a smattering of good previews - but even being able so easily to identify with the premise (getting 'round 30 and London life hasn't entirely gone to plan), I was unable to overlook the unfortunate issue that it really wasn't very good. And prior to Entourage on Thursday I caught a little Katy Brand. Katy Brand's Big-Ass Show is very much like the smell of vomit, in that while you know and remember that it is bad, a first-hand encounter always reminds you that it is far, far worse than contentment has enabled you to remember. What Paul Kaye and her from The IT Crowd are doing in it, I don't know. Couldn't they have got more fulfilling work, like advertising formula milk to Third World mothers, or peddling their arses on street corners?
Then out again for what I had thought would be a walk through the park (albeit under apocalyptic skies) to a cheap pub where we'd settle in for a while, but was in fact a pub crawl. I'm generally sceptical of pub crawls, especially ones which take place on a Saturday night, in the West End, in the rain, without the full addresses of certain key pubs. But, once we settled in at the Bear and Staff, a good evening. Not least because quite by chance my table gave me a perfect view of all the passing hen parties. Odd observation: without exception, the most attractive members of any West End hen party are within the first third as they go along the street. Shock troops, I suppose.
More importantly, I also made a glittery conker, and called him Glittery Conker, for reasons I hope are obvious.

Yesterday I teetered over to Green Lanes, which was closed for a free festival - ostensibly a food festival but I think demand had surprised them, although I did have one rather lovely Turkish honey ball (your innuendo here). Caught a couple of Irish bands too, one of whom entertained me by covering 'Anarchy in the UK' for a family audience, at an event sponsored by local businesses and attended by councillors and MPs. The speed of assimilation accelerates such that I'm convinced Rammstein's new video (actual p0rn, if you didn't know) will be on ToTP2 within ten years. Then home where I ended up watching Beerfest, which as expected is not on a par with Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell films, but as bandwagon-jumping goes, isn't too bad either.

Finally, these bats are adorable.