Deadbeats

It is infinitely probable that nobody other than HLoF and I give a tinker’s shit about this but what the hell. Just stumbled on this forthcoming boxset from Mad Tom O’the Waits. Apparently it collects 24 rare and 30 unreleased tracks from over the years. Predictably enough Waits describes it best on the Anti website:

When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song… and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.

What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer… I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.

Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.

If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss Army Knife and a snake bite kit.

Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.

Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.

Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.

On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18^th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer… There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.

I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.

In an attempt to shoehorn some relevance to all of this and writing… erm… I listen to him a lot while working and he features as a recurring character in The Organisation.

Good enough.

So then… FantasyCon.

Yeah. Well all would have been well were it not for the pernicious biological malingerer washed from some soft-drink pump into the unsuspecting gullet of your gentle author.

I missed most of it you see. Hunched fœtal in a hotel room smaller than dimensional physics should allow within the auspices of ‘twin’. I lost the plot sometime late Saturday afternoon, hit suddenly by intense gut-stabbing and nausea (oh yes, all the usual evacuations would follow over the next thirty-six hours have no fear of that; I would be incapable of retaining anything in the darkness that was to follow) and wouldn’t come out of ‘the fug’ of it all properly until 4:00 am Monday morning — five hours before my flight home.

It started well enough though. After a fond farewell to Bruve and the Boys (with a promise to return home extracted under physical duress and the judicious application of a cut-throat razor and a splintering pair of castanets) I flew my EasyJet way to Nottingham East-Midlands, riding out churning turbulence with a copy of The Reckoning by Sarah Pinborough (knowing she’d be at the Con I thought it only fair to finish it before arrival if only so I could rip the piss out of her for it; supportive like that, me). I nearly used it to bludgeon the sundry tossers that kept trying to sell me things during the flight (the trade off with ‘no frills’ it would seem — the fuckers don’t leave you alone: scratch cards, perfume, a Ginsters Pasty for three christing pounds fifty) but decided that tempers may still be thin in these ‘terrorist’ times.

Once down, and safe a taxi ride sees you at The Brittania Hotel in St. James Street. I managed to beat Thompson to it despite the fact that I gave myself what I like to think of as a fair handicap (starting in an entirely different country). Useless girl.

Once Her Ladyship had arrived and we’d checked that the books had been delivered (our stock for the weekend was being shipped by Parcel Force as Thompson was travelling by train) we decided that the only professional thing to do was go and stay in the bar for the rest of the evening — we did spend a while behind the Dealer’s Table at one point, but soon returned as our throats grew dry. Health first.

A splendid night was had in the company of such joyous folk as: Mark Morris (author of Toady from Humdrumming as well as many other superb novels - including Nowhere Near an Angel which I’ve finished since returning and suggest all discerning readers pick up), Pete Crowther (head of PS Publishing and Northern Gent), Graham Joyce, The Aforementioned Pinborough, Tim Lebbon, Steve Gallagher (it says so much that my last contact with this lovely chap was when I sent a picture of an Octogenarian with her tits out to him pretending it was Bruve; I am truly a Man of Letters) Adam L.G. Nevill (Gentleman Perv) and Kevin Mullins (Just Perv).

All was glorious, Humdrumming has a schedule planned for the next year — I believe the only way to strike such deals is with beer in hand — with some of the above names and I was very much on a high come bedtime.

I was also surprisingly sober.

Saturday morning, chipper and filling my face with the usual wilting bacon and cardboard toast that hotels do so well, Lee and I made ourselves ready for a ‘proper’ day of business. We had prepared some nice promotional things for the launch of Toady and Garry Kilworth’s In the Country of Tattooed Men, a sampler that looked like a school exercise book (Starmouth Secondary from the fictional world of Toady) containing short stories by Mark, Garry and myself as well as ‘Horror Club’ badges and a pack of temporary Humdrumming tattoos. They went down extremely well, causing lots of good intentioned jealousy from Pete. The spare packs of these are going to be given away by Shocklines — the prestigious US Horror bookstore.

James Christie came over for a couple of hours, as did Steve Newman (Lee and I were introduced to his new lady; poor woman, she’s probably stopped crying now).

I drank a Coke.

All were quick to remind me how popular my launch speech had been the year before and were fascinated to know if I could match it for this year. No pressure.

The Coke did bad things.

Soft drinks had been off at the bar for awhile, some problem with the pump apparently. The pint I’d downed had been a bit flat, but it was wet and cold and I was too busy or thirsty to care.

I started to sweat.

Lee and I decided that we should get some food before the evening kicked off so we strolled into town, all the while my stomach stabbing and churning. Hopefully, I thought, a bit of food would settle it.

Ten minutes later I was dashing back to the hotel, convinced I was going to throw up in the near future. In the lobby I bumped into Clive Barker — a genuine hero and someone I had a business proposition for but had yet to get him on his own to discuss. Here he was, stepping out the lift. “Hey”, he said, all Trans-Atlantic smiles and approachability. “Hey”, I replied, deciding that throwing-up on a best-selling author is never a way of endearing oneself. Racing up in the lift, swearing at the bastard for being so slow, furious that I’d had my perfect ‘in’ with Barker but was in no fit state to use it. I made it to the room bathroom on time and had my body beaten up from the inside. Muscles straining, twitching, tears in my eyes, abject bloody misery.

All the time keeping my eye on the time as the book launch was in less than an hour.

After a couple of abortive attempts to leave the room I finally got down there with a couple of minutes to spare, apologised to Lee and Mark for the exercise in brevity they were about to hear and — after being introduced as “our insane friends from Humdrumming”; they’ll be calling us bloody ‘zany’ next — managed a few minutes of nonsense involving Mark’s addiction to the lethal by-products of the brewing process found in the outlet pipes of his local Tadcaster breweries and promptly shut up. Bit of an anti-climax for all, really.

I tried to hang around, everyone was grabbing a curry and, hoping that whatever had been wrong with my system was now well and truly out of it, I was determined to have my Saturday night.

An hour later and I’m back in my room for one of the longest, most painful and feverish nights I can remember.

Lee had fun though - he may well flesh out this part of the weekend himself, drinking games and barfly debates — but I remember little of it. Even water made my stomach roll before flooding back out again. It was desperate.

I grabbed a few hours of Sunday. I covered Lee for an hour in the Dealers’ Room while he tried to get over his hangover, met Mark’s family briefly and then vanished back upstairs where I lost consciousness again until the Award Ceremony.

It’s no great surprise that we didn’t win, both Mark and I were nominated (he for the aforementioned Nowhere Near an Angel) but we could see that the competition was harsh and — more to the point — the predictable winner in each of our categories was a ’shoo-in’, so we agreed that we were both silver medallists in the absence of proof to the contrary and clapped in all the right places.

I did manage a brief word with The Lord Barker — covering my fever sweats well, one presumes — which hopefully will lead to something interesting but vanished swiftly back upstairs again.

Knowing I still had to forward my return flight details to Bruve, book a taxi, and sort out various paperwork things with Lee, I was determined not to space out straight away but — worse than ever — I crashed and didn’t resurface until four the following morning feeling the best I had so far.

So, an early morning of planning and much water drinking and before you know it I’m back here in Spain. Back to final deadlines and — I shit you not — some form of bloody cold virus!

Just about had enough now, thank you. Could some kind soul please point to exactly where it was my health went?

Ah well, there’s always Toronto…

Gx

There’s something coming to Stockton.

The residents feel it, a genetically wired race memory of foreign intrusion, the hackles on the back of their neck raising even as the family dog lifts its head to a Northern night sky and begins to howl. Within hours they’re herding the children into the back of the Mondeo and making for the safety of the hills. By Friday night the streets are empty but for the occasional lonely piece of gutter trash spiralling its way in the lamplight, uncertain of where to go.

They’re here.

And they’re wearing scarves.

The last time I had the decency to spice this column up a bit by travelling away and becoming your roving anorak I was in Perth, Australia. This time the journey was only slightly shorter but the destination a tad less glamorous.

I’m in Teesside.

They speak less English here than in Australia.

Ooh, but that was unnecessarily cruel.

The reason I’ve brought my cultured tones to the land of the elongated vowel? I’m wearing my anorak even tighter than normal. I’m here for a Doctor Who convention.

Time to put my time honoured anorakism principles to the test then.

I’m cheating of course, I pretty much know what to expect, my hymen of convention respectability having been well and truly breached about five years ago (in Coventry; it was surprisingly gentle with me but did leave me with a funny taste in my mouth and a curt letter on my pillow).

I know by now to expect a smattering of costumed attendees, their ability to hold conversation frequently proportionate to the florid-ity of their waistcoats. Why, a few hours ago I had the life changing sight of watching a faux Tom Baker make out with an equally faux Peter Davison within the shadows of an hotel bar, a thrashing and sighing mess of curly hair and striped cricket trouser, I look forward to the result nine months down the line. I am in no doubt that it will be stitched into a suitable costume the minute the umbilical is cut and I shall make its acquaintance this time next year.

Previous conventions offered many a child in costume but usually with the equally pleasurable sight of a bored parent trailing behind it (the look on its face being, at best, bemusement; at worst utter arse-shattering fear; as if their offspring has just revealed a new found love of sexual perversion and they really have to attend the golden shower panel after lunch). This time though, it’s in reverse, fan parents helping to keep national bullying statistics high by calling their child Romana and forcing them to wear hand stitched frock coats in social situations. This will no doubt turn out to be deeply character building and, hating kids anyway, I’m disinclined to worry; let the fuckers deal with it in counselling later. I had the shit beaten out of me at school and it never did me any harm.

(I spent thirty pounds this weekend on a four-foot inflatable dalek, feel free to disagree with the above statement.)

Still, it’s all in the name of good clean fun. Don’t let my naturally dry and scathing manner lead you to believe otherwise.

Thanks to the gentle tutelage of the Dalek Builder’s Guild, I now have an overriding fondness for the words ‘hemisphere’ and ‘dome’; thanks to Gary Russell I now dream of skiing down women’s breasts; thanks to Conrad Westmaas, I jealously fear Nick Brigg’s sense of humour to be darker and more twisted than my own — this remains unproven, you understand, I will want some form of officially governed test before relinquishing my reputation; thanks to Doug ‘Finch’ Inman, I’ll probably spend the next few days crippled with mucoid head death.

Swings and roundabouts then.

The hotel staff have been as baffled as usual, no doubt crying themselves to sleep nightly for having neither the foresight nor option to have booked this weekend off work. The management however, are overjoyed to realise that if there’s one unifying factor amongst Doctor Who fans it’s their capacity for drink. Fortunes have been made this weekend even as fan’s bank balance’s have taken a good and solid shafting.

(Hmm… I just pictured ‘Tom’ and ‘Peter’ again, the continued use of analogy may have to be carefully monitored.)

There is, predictably, a resounding lack of comprehension from the few residents brave enough to stay within the town, perceived notions of fandom leading them to nail garlic at their windows and crosses on their doors (with one notable exception, a taxi driver who, having heard Kate O’Mara had been present proceeded to outline quite how enthused he was at the notion of ‘giving her one’ - had I had the chance to put his offer forward I would have been only too glad; if his performance is as enthusiastic as his chat she would have been bandy for a week with her eyes turned a subtle pastel colour.) There is, as with every cliché, a degree of truth to their view of us. Yes I’ve been surrounded by the hollow and the lonely, the twisted and the bizarre, the obsessional and the demented but you know what? They surround me every day, due to one single inalienable factor.

We’re all only human.

And, as in all gatherings of a suitable number there have been the usual diversifications, for every Tom Baker wig there has been a product-spiked coiffure of gay glam. For every velvet clad whisperer there was the loud drunken roar of a t-shirt and jeans leaning on a bar.

So sit there and mock from a distance by all means but I’m always going to win. Do you know why? Because when I feel that twinge of being the outsider, begin to question my thoughts, desires, taste, when I get that brittle fear of being ‘not we’. Or, heaven forbid, just fancy a bit of a laugh. Well…

I’ve got somewhere to go.

You’ll know where to find me, I’m the giggling fool in the corner, smoking up a fury and watching a man that has become Pat Troughton for the weekend dry-hump his wife in her Cyberman Costume.

Either that or I’ll be chilling in the bar with the usual wonderful mix of society. There’ll be plenty of us, Indulging in our usual joyful obsession, our passion.

Where will you be?

G.

Spread the love, it’s good for your skin.

	Read: Bernice Summerfield Novels - Various At the time of writing there is a whorish offer of all six paperbacks for a tenner which inclines me to believe these fine books didn’t sell half as well as they had a right to. Big Finish’s entire Benny Summerfield output (books and audio dramas) has been a joy no doubt overlooked by many fans. Put it this way: As an actor and writer I would be just as, if not more, enthused at the notion of working on the series as their Doctor Who range. Let fellow anoraks comprehend the weight of that compliment and then spend their money. Lisa Bowerman gives Aural pleasure and I intend to write such on the walls of as many public conveniences as the ink in my marker pen will allow.
	Listen: Arrangements for War - Paul Sutton To prove Owen wrong and Gary right. A fine and rich play that manages to convey drama, time and emotion that belies the odd bad review it has received as the witterings of dribblers. An audio with a genuine and affecting sense of scope.
	Watch: Big Finish Talks Back - Paul McGann A superb DVD that captures the bizarre contradiction of this fine actor, a man who is as intense as he is calm, usually both at the same time. Witty, perceptive and with a career filled with just the sort of stories that make a DVD (or, indeed, a Convention Panel) fly by. Also features an interview with McGann joined by India Fisher (his co-star in the Big Finish dramas). At which point he becomes, well… A flirt frankly.

Note: This column is respectfully dedicated to Dean’s mentals, Kim’s tits, Lee’s Nurses and Gary’s cows.
Baker Scarf: Lee Thompson, scholar, gent and dedicated follower of fashion.
Excess Perversion: Model’s own
Photo’s taken by Guy Adams & Phil Jarrett.

Brought to you with an unapologetic bias towards the output of Big Finish, having found, much to my shame, that ‘artistic director’ Gary Russell is a far finer chap than I had expected him to be.

(Unless, of course, he should happen to read this, in which case he’s a 100%, satisfaction guaranteed, fur-lined, ocean going, G-List Celebrity free-loader. No sense in swelling the man’s head.)

So there I am, several hours of wakefulness on the wrong side of a pathological hatred for all mankind, when it has a go at me…

IT (too damn hateful for a personal pronoun) has got a problem with me smoking… in a smoking area.

Immense physical tiredness and slight cramps are nudging me towards psychosis and some daft sod wants to up the ante.

Now let me be clear here, I like to consider myself a ’sensitive’ smoker - aware of those around me, happy to reasonably temper my habit for the sake of others in my presence. But, the absurdity of someone going out of their way in order to give a smoker a hard time is quite beyond by ability to rationalize. It’s rude, pointless, aggravating and, potentially, rather dangerous, I am, after all, a man on ‘borrowed time’ as she is only too happy to remind me, would you really antagonize a man with nothing to lose? For all she knows I may well snap and do something destructive to her wizened bulldog’s arse of a face, you know… just for fun; hooligan smoker that I am. The temptation was strong but, exhausted, I was beyond the physical ability to act.

If this had been Heathrow, with its smoker’s section reminiscent of a waiting room in Soylent Green, fading yellow people puffing voluminous clouds, the air of fatalism as thick as the nicotine stains on the formica; I may well have killed her… driven temporarily insane by my surroundings. But this is Singapore and they do things better here. I am in the ‘Sunflower Garden’, my dry and desperate skin being slowly revived by the ‘tropical mist’ that is sprayed from chrome pillars onto our bodies, the heat and brightness of the early morning sun forcing we night journeymen to shed layers and add sunglasses.

She is lucky, I am away from my cramped airplane seat, a cappuccino sweet and frothing in one hand a duty-free American Marlboro in the other. I am reduced to simple pleasures, basic lusts, these two are better than sex to me right now and all I need to survive the hour’s wait before my next flight is silence on the part of this dreadful creature.

“I’m a mother!” she cries, waving her hand in front of her nose with no less energy than had someone just taken a healthy dump on her hairy upper lip. This piece of logic has me stumped. We (for there’s a reasonable crowd of us fuming deviants by now) assume - against the evidence of our own eyes - that this aging beast is pregnant, then she clarifies: “I have children!”

Right… this… thing… has reproduced and that is why we should cease our habit this very instant. Presumably in deference to the fates that allowed someone to find this harridan attractive enough to indulge in physical contact beyond stabbing at it with sharpened sticks.

Then we meet one of these hallowed offspring, male, early thirties - doomed to be crucified upon a Sunflower unless he stops the exaggerated ‘puffing’ smoker mime he’s performing for us with all the bravura ludicrousness of an idiot child teasing animals in the zoo. It must be genetic - this incredible and mind numbing arrogance and insensitivity. I was (and still am) utterly at a loss to explain this woman’s immense attitude problem - I wish I could say that she was mentally ill in some form, ranting and insulting those gathered with all the unfortunate abandon of a Tourettes sufferer. Truth is, she was absolutely rational, just another ignorant member of an increasingly belligerent and hostile society.

The ultimate irony is that I have decided to give up smoking. Partly due to the fact that I really cannot put it off for any longer (like many smokers, I always felt I would stop soon… it’s picking the precise time that’s hard) and partly out of the realization that If I ever meet this woman again I’d love to have sufficient energy in my body and air in my lungs to give the cow a run for her money.

G.

Spread the love, it’s good for your skin:

	Listen to: Reality - David Bowie Because I’m a fanboy, obviously, I mean, c’mon, this is Bowie… why weren’t you cueing to buy it on the day of release?.
	Read: Batman: Arkham Asylum - Grant Morrison Probably the first thing I read by Mr. Morrison, certainly not the last. Took the Batman character and proceeded to make him genuinely interesting for 96 pages. Also features the sublime artwork of Dave McKean, more about whom next week I think…
	Watch: Bill Hicks - Totally [1994] Or, indeed, any other video or album you can get your hands on, probably THE best stand-up comedian to come out of America. Painfully funny, also gifted with being opinioned AND right, not always easy. Died like a martyr ten years ago.