As if depreciation to his own deed: he removed his own head.

The Moon

The moon has never seemed to me to hang in the sky. It looks as though it has been pushed into the sky and the sky has bent slightly to accommodate it. Imagine pushing a sickly yellow pus-coloured coin into a piece of thick, dark brown cloth. The poems and stories written concerning the moon, though forever perplexed, have been lost on me. Maybe I can’t see the beauty of the moon through the haze of smog and the toxic condensation that has taken up permanent residence on my eyeballs. The thought of the moon being anything other than a vomit stain on the sky to me is wholly alien. How does such a thing create such admiration and intrigue? The mythology surrounding the moon is generally highly sexual. Both its undertones and overtones. I think the moon is an excuse to go crazy, rip off your clothes, grow your hair and fuck anything that moves. People just want to do that. The moon is disgusting. My apologies to Stephanie Meyer.

Why Starting a Band Is Trickier Than It Looks

The band I am a part of was started by our singer Joey and our bassist Luke in an empty room of Fazakerley High School. They then wandered their way into the common room where I was sat, probably staring at a wall, and asked me to join. We played a disastrous gig and then decided we needed a drummer. We hired Billy. Since then we haven't had a break. Either from playing shows all over the country, in the city or simply writing. Now, when we started we were simply amazed by how easily everything seemed to come together. We were getting gigs, writing songs, everything was going great.

You wonder how bands in the past could have managed to get anywhere without social media. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were our main lines of contact with each other, fans and booking agents. How on earth did the Stooges get noticed without even having a MySpace? Surely if we embrace this amazing technology, we HAVE to get somewhere. Surely. Surely.

After a while of embracing the great electric mother you realise why you haven't been on the cover of any magazines yet. Imagine yourself as a record label scout in the past. You scour your city, your area, your country looking for amazing bands. You manage to get yourself to three gigs a week, you find The Stooges or Nick Cave in an unpolished form, you take a chance and you're set. Now imagine yourself as a record label scout today. It's your email address on the labels website. You get 200 emails a day from every band in the country advertising their MySpace to you.

The chances are pretty slim, whether you're Nick Cave 2 or not, that you'll be noticed by these people. They are simply over-fed with requests. It is understandable why record labels like to put their own bands together, a sure thing that they know will sell, rather than search for years trying to find a band to take a risk on.

This is why DIY has become far more popular than ever in the past few years. Record labels don't seem to care for the bands any more. The bands have to care for themselves. Holding out hope, of course, that a scout from Parlophone or EMI will be in the mass of 7 people at their gig. Maybe David Geffen works on the bar, part-time.

While this may sound like some kind of rant at the music industry, it really isn't. By forcing bands to take care of themselves, bands have now been given complete power. They can truly express themselves exactly how they want to. No more money-minded executives breathing down their neck. They also now have a direct line to their audience, the only people the band need to impress. Although financially this is probably not the best thing to happen to bands, artistically and creatively it really is.

Starting a band is one of the easiest things you can do. All you need is a couple of willing participants and some instruments. Keeping a band together and keeping hope is far trickier.

My Name Is Thomas

My name is Thomas. Nothing much happened for the first part of my life. Mainly a series of movies, video games and trampolines. Then, at some point in 2008, I was approached by some school friends and asked to join a band. Since that day it seems I haven't stopped. The name of that band is The Temps. We average at about 60 gigs a year. If each gig I played with had 2 other bands on (which it is usually more) using my simply astounding mathematical prowess, I can calculate that over the past 3 years I have watched 360 bands. Give or take. Although we are fans of travelling, before we had the ability to do so we mainly played Liverpool and we still do play Liverpool quite a bit, but I think this has given me a fairly accurate view of the state of the music scene here -and how the rest of the UK relates to Liverpool.

More recently I have been getting involved in another aspect of the arts. I gained a BTEC in Theatre Technology and have been working on and seeing a fair amount of Liverpool’s theatre chops. It was a bit of a culture shock moving from a musical performer to a back stage theatre worker. The sheer levels of stress that are involved for the latter, seem so distant from the fairly laid-back approach of rolling onto a stage a few minutes late and hitting an instrument with battered and bloodied hands. The theatre scene in Liverpool is also a very different affair to the music scene. The music scene always seems to follow a pattern. One year in was entirely indie bands, the next it was entirely metal bands and the latest year it seems to be the combination of rock music and electronica that I don't think has been labelled yet, so I will do it myself: ‘Beepcore’. While the theatre scene seems to never follow a pattern. Every show I go to or am involved with seems to be a world apart from the last one.

I think the main reason that theatre is so creatively free, while music is sounding somewhat uniform at the moment, is a simple one. Theatre is not as popular. This means that only a person, who is truly in love with it, aspires to be a part of it. Because music is more in vogue, it seems that most of the musical outfits are only half thought out and as a result...not too great. This isn’t to say that I have fallen out of love with music. To the contrary, amazing music is still being created all throughout Liverpool and the UK, and even the world. It has just become trickier to find. This is why I have stayed to see 360 bands over the past 3 years. So I could see the 20-30 bands that made me say ‘wow’.

Love Poems: A Rant

It’s not that I dislike love poems. A good one can be very beautiful and thought provoking. However, when a poem simply consists of re-used ideas and cliché verses, I do. I don’t really care if you want to write something like that. I don’t have to read it. Yet I love to rant. So fuck it.

I find it rather shallow when a poem consists mainly of a description of a person. I understand love is simply an infatuation bordering on obsession for another person or thing and that just makes you want to think about what you love about that person (forgetting their flaws.). But when it’s merely physical properties and character traits, written down with the use of a thesaurus and the overuse of similes. Bleh*.

I don’t think love poems should ever be about the person you love. More of the affect that person has on you. I think all poems are extremely personal and written by rather self centred people who just like to write down what they think and hope to hell someone else likes it to achieve the gratification they did not receive for the early part of their lives.

I respect deeply, anyone who wishes to flex creativity, there should be more of it. Be free to write whatever the fuck you feel like and never ever listen to me. I just couldn’t sleep and felt like a rant. I tried to write a love poem once. It went like this:

I love you more than
A hobo loves a warm bed
If you died
It would take me a good
Year and a half
To get over it

*”Bleh” Is a word. Look it up.

The Blinding White Light. (short story)

It was December 4th when her body was found. Contorted into a position that would seem impossible to anyone who wasn't a master of yoga. A tangled mess which resembled a destroyed spider’s web. The expression on her face could not be instantly seen by those who found her. The blood had to be washed away before it could be seen. After that, her expression could only be described as "confused and hurt".

She was found in this condition above a huge concrete dam overlooking a huge clear river. Her tangled mess of a body lay on the concrete surrounded in snow with a small pool of blood that flowed from the gash on her head where it had collided with the ground. While this could easily be mistaken for the cause of her death, it was clear from the autopsy that she had been strangled. Her neck was grabbed and thumbs pushed against her oesophagus.

The girl was a twenty three year old witch. She manipulated the physical world by manipulating her perception of the physical world. Another way to put it is that she would create her own world inside her head. Yet another way to put this is insanity. Nevertheless she practised this every day. She gave herself the label of "witch", despite the idea of a hag on a broomstick, so that she would not be labelled with the more correct name of magician. She preferred the hag on the broomstick to the man pulling doves from the sleeves of his tuxedo.

Being a very awkward and shy, child and teenager she had very few friends by this point in her life. Despite having more friends than she ever thought she would in her younger days, she remained a recluse. Rarely seen and rarely heard. She never spoke about her family or upbringing. She was a borderline mute, walking mystery. Now a tangled mess of limbs on the cold, hard, concrete ground.

She was found at six o'clock in the morning by a young couple, only twenty five years old. And their daughter, only five years old. As well as their six year old beagle called Poppet. But theirs is a story all their own, this is a story about a twenty three year old reclusive dead girl.

Being such a shy girl in her youth she honed her skills on escaping bleak, upsetting world around her. She did this by exploring the realms of sheer fantasy that existed within her own imagination. This is where, she believed, her true friends were. The wonderful characters she imagined were far greater than anyone around her. Whether these be the people she met, saw on television or read in her piles of books.

Amongst her friends she created a character she called Marsletarp. This character held the place of her very best friend. He was eight feet tall, a long skeleton-like figure, dressed as a Victorian gentleman complete with top hat, tails and a long cane he carried everywhere he went. He had no face. Just a warm, glowing white light. The girl hated people’s faces. She only knew faces to express anger and disgust and hatred and disappointment. Nobody bothered to tell her about the good expressions. So she gave her best friend a warm, glowing white light instead of a face. This could never express these emotions she loathed.

He also had a deep, loud booming voice. The girl preferred this type of voice. It was far more unthreatening then shrill voices. People screamed with shrill voices. He was a simple character. Despite these characteristics he didn't seem to have any real personality. He was simply someone. Someone perfect who stopped her feeling alone in this huge scary world. His voice would make her calm in moments of anxiety and stress and he was always there. Just what she needed. A little girls best friend.

It was because of her characters, but mainly Marsletarp that she began to study magic. She wanted her creations to be realized in the physical world her body lived in, but mind left long ago. So she began to study at the age of seventeen. She absorbed every book, lecture, DVD and Youtube video she could find on the subject. It consumed her life for six whole years. Adding of course to her unintended public persona of a weirdo, but not deterring her from her goal. Partially because she had stopped caring years previous what people thought of her and partially because, being so wrapped up in her studies of magic that she failed to notice the people around her.

While her imaginary friends kept her company during this time, it's fair to say they fell slightly to the wayside. Which is ironic as the entire endeavour was taken on to bring them closer together. The girl knew of this but she figured it would pay off once she could perform magic. The imaginary friends, however, didn't see it her way. She had created them before the idea of magic had even occurred to her, they felt what she felt when they were created. So they began to feel abandoned and not really knowing why. She had left them to pursue this new goal of hers and they were neither loved nor needed anymore.

This sense of abandonment grew and grew and rage grew and grew. Though the girl would never know, they would never let her know. They were created to bring her happiness, not anger. Feeling the brunt of this emotion, of course, was Marsletarp. He had once been the most exhalted amongst these characters, he now felt as though he was a lowly peasant. Feeling left and forgotted by the little girl who created and loved him. He no longer loved her. The rage had grown over time and erased the feeling of love. He felt only resentment to his "best friend". Though he hadn't seen a friend in her for years. The few moments he was called by her he would hide his anger. It was lucky for him he was never given a face.

After six years of seemingly endless study, the girl finally decided that her levels of skill and knowledge were high enough to attempt the ritual she needed. This ritual, she read, needed to be performed near any small body of water. She didn't know how small this body of water had to be, so she opted for the lake. Even if it was overkill she found this particular spot to be rather beatiful, possibly due to the lack of people at 2 o'clock in the morning. A beautiful place for a beautiful moment, the moment she finally meets her best friend.

The ritual created a dark doorway which crossed the gap between the imaginary world and the world where humans lived. She could barely contain her excitement when the black vortex revealed itself in front of her. From the black circle she saw one thing. A glowing white light. The light that constituted as a face for her imaginary best friend soon to cross into the "real" world. He reached his long black leg through the doorway, his foot made a tap as it hit the concrete on the other side. He was really there. The rest of his eight foot skeletor frame emerged itself from the doorway. He replaced his hat.

As soon as he was out, the imaginary character stormed towards the girl. His long legs gave him remarkable speed as he bounded towards her. The girl looked in glee as he came towards her, arms outstretched. Glee turned to horror as she noticed the arms were too close together for a hug and the fingers were also outstretched and aimed at her neck. She was a quick girl. But not quick enough. His long, white slender fingers wrapped around her neck and his thumbs pressed against her oesophagus. No matter how much she twisted and scratched and attempted to scream, she couldn’t escape his grasp. He saw the life leave her eyes and threw her to the floor, cracking her skull open on the concrete. The last thing she saw was the blinding white light.

It was December 4th when she was found. Her body was contorted in a most peculiar fashion. Her head was covered in blood and her legs were twisted and her hands were wrapped around her neck.

x

Aged Yummy.

Played with these 3 lovely chaps from Huddersfield back in 1783. Loved them then. They finished their album last month. My finger is so far from the pulse I've only found out now. They stream it free from their million websites. For fucks sakes download it.

I've been bored of music for a while now. It's just so fucking boring it hurts. This is not. This is like nothing I've ever heard and I have heard a lot. It sounds like they're making it up as they go a long, but they're so clearly not. It's just amazing. I love it.

The vocals are just short rhythmic bursts of intellectual lyrics. The guitar/bass are also short bursts of tuneful and often discordant bits of twangy noise. The drums are tight and add as much to the sound as any other instrument, which is very rare nowadays.

Their album is called Pacific Reactions and it is fucking cuntingly good.

www.myspace.com/agedyummy

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