Cardiff 22.04.09
“What happened the last times we’ve been to Cardiff?’
‘CHIP LANE!’
‘Oh my god, it is, isn’t it. It’s the HOME of Chip Lane!’
THE LEGEND OF CHIP LANE
The first time we ever went to Cardiff, we got hungry, late at night. Someone whispered to us about a legendary place, known as ‘chippie lane.’ Famished and not a little drunk, we set out to find this ‘chippie lane’, where the cobblestones were strewn with potato and paper pulp. Where the air was warm, and fat scented. Where a man or a woman could choose from a multitude of chip vendors. Chips in a cone, in a box, in a cup or a bucket. Chips with sauce, or mayo. Vinegar, or just salt. Maybe even lemon.
We never found chip lane, that night. We wandered Cardiff in circles. Our run became a stagger. Our yelps of ‘Chip LANE’ became whimpers, until eventually we gave up, rested our heads on an empty crisp packet and let our stomach’s rumblings lull us into a doze. We dreamed of chips. We blamed our tour manager.
Chip Lane became a myth. Late at night in cities across the world the cry was taken up. In Groningen, the Netherlands, the cry started a dash through the city streets, tumbles through hedges and eventually brought us to a hotel lobby where a pair of middle aged dutch gentlemen rode bikes in the lobby and Dan accidentally smashed a lift. In Las Vegas it took us to an all night casino where the drinks are free so long as you keep on gambling.
But we never dared hope we would find it for real.
And so, we returned to Cardiff. The legend of Chip Lane had grown so far that we barely remembered its origins. Until we did.
‘Matt….do you think we could stop somewhere for chips?’
‘Chip….lane?’
Sat Nav was no help. But the story of Chip Lane infects all those who hear it. We knew the search was hopeless. Matt and Olly didn’t. And so we sat in the back of the van as they drove. We could tell they didn’t even know why they were driving. The fever was upon them and the search for Chip Lane couldn’t cease til sucess ….or death.
‘The thing is, it’s not real.’
‘No. It doesn’t exist.’
‘I’ve found the Chip Lane INSIDE.’
‘Me too.’
‘It’s like the story.’
‘What story?’
‘……I don’t know. Where you go on a massive journey searching for something and find out you had it all along. What’s that story called?’
‘Pokemon.’
‘It’s every story.’
‘Yeah it kinda is.’
They stopped to ask a passerby. They were cautious, not wanting to let on that they were on this quest, lest the passerby deliberately confuse them.
‘You don’t happen to know if there’s an open kebab shop nearby do you?’
‘Just Chippie Lane, probably, at this time.’
We drove, and we drove.
And then we rounded a corner.
And we saw it. I shrieked. Everyone else was just stunned and silent. It is truly gods country. If god likes chips.
Henning: ‘OHHHH, THIS street! I proposed to Tania here once.’
I don’t know what this means, for the future. For the legend. We’re all still digesting it, really. Also digesting some other things. Which were, for the record, very, very fine.
11:45 am • 23 April 2009
Manchester 21.04.09
‘Hey! They gave us vodka!’
‘Hang on. This says VODKAT.’
‘It smells like vodka….but it’s only 22%’
‘Chuck us the diet coke.’
A discussion of the name VODKAT, and the benefits/downsides of 22% alcohol drinks in general lead us to invent (or THEORISE , given geographical difficulties re supply - physical invention may have to wait a month or two but once you have a name, you’re on your way) MALIBOOKOO. I, for one, can’t wait.
‘Hey….were those ‘no smoking in the dressing room’ signs there before we soundchecked?’
‘No, I don’t think they were.’
‘We should probably stop smoking.’
The general consensus, round midnight was that VODKAT didn’t work. But that was before we left and drove for ten minutes before Matt suddenly yelled SHIT and stopped the van.
‘What?’
‘We’ve been driving along with the back door wide open.’
‘That must be why those dudes were pointing at us.’
We didn’t even dare to hope that everything would still be there.
We drove back the way we came looking for bits of luggage and guitar cases on the road.
‘If my guitar’s gone I’m going to kill myself. You can hold me to it.’
‘Shake on it.’
Dan shook.
‘That doesn’t apply to the epiphone.’
But, miraculously, everything was still there. Turns out a well packed van (thanks Matt) can survive ten minutes of varying speeds and road surfaces with a wide open door without incident.
So to a travelodge! Where Louisa and I crawled into our (super-comfortable, surprisingly) bed only to discover blood stains on the duvet cover. Neither of us were bleeding. But it wasn’t that much blood. And we were tired. And reception was ages away.
In the morning I did let the desk guy know, but I couldn’t think of any compensation Travelodge could give me that would be satisfying, so I settled for feeling vaguely like a good citizen. According to Matt blood diseases die within twenty minutes of leaving the body anyway.
‘So…..did your room have a double bed in it…and no other beds?’
‘Uh….yeah.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We shared. Obviously. What did you do?’
‘Finn slept on the couch and I slept on the floor and Henning slept in the bed.’
‘Whats wrong with you?”
‘I’d share a bed with a man. Just not with Henning.’
‘He started snoring before he went to sleep.’
‘It wasn’t even snoring! It was like…..’
‘Do the imitation!’
‘I can’t, it ruins my throat. It was like….an animal drowning, but without water.’
‘Oi, Matt, did you and Olly share?’
‘No.’
In a tone that said, obviously.
I’m not a big one for sighing ‘oh…men’. But seriously. MEN.
BREAKFAST!
Olly had found a cafe called ‘Homemade and Healthy’ via the miracle of iphone.
It was LOVELY. And the waitress was positively angelic.
And then there was the food.
Dans breakfast. ’Beans and cheese on toast please. It’s what I have every morning.’ £2.95, Coffee £0.70, Orange Juice £0.50.
Finn’s breakfast. ‘The Mega Breakfast’. ‘I think I wouldn’t mind black pudding if I didn’t know what it was.’ £3.95, Coffee £0.70, Orange Juice £0.50
Henning’s Breakfast. ‘The small breakfast please. Can I have a cappuccino?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh. I’ll have…just a coffee then thanks.’ £3.00 Coffee £0.70 Orange Juice £0.50
Matt’s Breakfast. Note: upon leaving for tour, Matt was a pescetarian. I don’t know what it means that touring with us makes people want to load up on meat (by)products. ‘The mega breakfast muffin, please.’ ‘Sorry, we’re out of muffins, so I put it on two rolls.’ £3.95 Coffee £0.70 Orange Juice £0.50
Olly’s Breakfast. ‘The Mega Breakfast.’ ‘Actually, Black Pudding is very nutritious. In Austria it is made from everything on the Pig’s head. Which is a lot of….nutrients.’ £3.95 Coffee £0.70, Orange Juice £0.50
Louisa’s Breakfast. Ordered off menu, specific about the raw tomato, and at first they forgot the toast, but then bought us extra. £2.95 Coffee £0.70, Orange Juice £0.50.
My Breakfast. ‘This is a lot of egg for the money.’ £1.45, Coffee £0.70.
AND IT WAS SUNNY.
12:39 pm • 22 April 2009
The Crossword
It’s Dan’s turn to read out the clues, mine and Louisa’s to shout out the answers. Finn prefers to ruminate on older clues before interjecting the answers later on, to cause more confusion.
‘Hybrid offspring of two big cats.’
‘LIGER! LIGER!’
‘Ligers aren’t real, are they?’
‘It doesn’t say REAL offspring of two big cats.’
‘Henning! Google!’
As the only one of us with a proper outside-Veils job, Henning is also the one with the internet dongle. He sits frowning over his emails in the van. We do the crossword.
‘……yeesssss….Liger….exists….’
‘Google image! If it’s all paintings, they’re not real.’
Our new guitar tech is called Matt. We lost Iain to the band Henning manages. How unfair is that. So far, Matt’s good. Sadly lacking an incomprehensible Scottish accent and hasn’t hit Dan in the head with a cuban heeled boot yet, but good.
He also knows a bit about Ligers.
‘I’m pretty sure they’re a real thing.’
Henning’s come up with an answer.
‘There are real pictures.’
‘Find a picture of a Liger where its parents are a MALE lion and a FEMALE tiger.’
‘You think that means it’s more likely to have a mane, don’t you Finn?’
‘……….’
‘Find a picture of a MALE LIGER.’
‘It just looks like a lion.’
‘How d’you reckon they do it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like….does it happen naturally? Or is it zookeepers having a laugh?’
‘Yeah! Like, does a Lion happen to be wandering along, see a Tiger and go…you know what….I’ll have a go.’
‘They don’t live in the same place, Soph. You retard.’
‘…..Oh yeah. So it must be zookeepers.’
‘Yeah, but d’you reckon they do it artificially? Or just….make them have sex?’
‘What, they bung em both in a cage, stand back and go ….ah well, if this goes tits up I’ll just jump in and haul one of them out?’
‘Like those kids we saw with the pit bulls the other day.’
‘Yeah. No. No I don’t think they do that.’
‘I bet they do. Why WOULDN’T they want to have sex. They’re both CATS.’
‘Henning! Wikipedia!’
‘What’s the question?’
‘DO TIGERS AND LIONS HAVE SEX BECAUSE THEY WANT TO.’
‘No, the crossword question.’
‘THAT DOESN’T MATTER.’
‘I think they do, you know.’
‘They don’t.’
‘Horses and Donkeys do.’
‘Horses and Donkeys aren’t fightey animals.’
‘I’m not saying there WOULDN’T be fighting. But there would also be sex.’
‘HENNING! DO THEY?’
‘YES……………………..I haven’t been paying attention and I don’t know what you’re asking me.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Oh, wait. It says…..yes. They existed before modern technology. They started in Asia.’
‘Unless a dude just decided to jack off a Tiger and then…..’
‘It’s not Liger anyway. It doesn’t work with Latin.’
‘Matt? I need to piss.’
‘We just stopped!’
Olly is our new sound man. Not so new. He does stuff with us whenever we go to Australia and New Zealand, normally. He’s Austrian. And practical.
‘How many coffees have you had today Dan?’
‘Three. And I’m small. And I’m old.’
2:29 pm • 21 April 2009
Reading 18.04.09
Not so much a dressing room, this. More of a couch in a bar. But that was how it was, in Reading. And a dressing room is not a requirement, for a good show. I once went to see Jay Reatard, and arrived at the club, which was playing Loud Music, to find the entire band sprawled on couches beside the stage, fast asleep, whilst gig-goers milled around them, possibly debating whether to go nick a lock of the bass players hair. They woke up and played amazing. We….
I dunno. Maybe someone who was there could let us know. Oh wait, someone did, they wrote it on the mailing list signup sheet. ‘yousuck@hotmail.com.’
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
Guildford had been quite nice. Not a seething mass of people, and the girl who was ranting, full volume, to her mates, right in front of me throughout was kind of irritating, seeing as there was quite a lot of not-in-front-of-stage bar that she could’ve been ranting in, but then, as I thought at the time, whilst I was debating a leap off the stage to tell her to shut the hell up (an absorbing train of thought which caused me to go completely out of time in Larkspur, earning a wry smile and enhanced drumbeat from H. Dietz), no doubt her response, if she was a quick thinker, would’ve been ‘be a better band so I want to listen to you.’ And she would’ve been right. And yeah. It was fun, and people were nice, in general. Three decent shows in a row, this early in the tour….it was starting to look like a bit of a run.
‘Hmm…we’re not listed in their April events.’
‘That’s odd.’
Post soundcheck and eats we amused ourselves with the papers, and with watching Reading’s early drinkers (odd mix of older women in strappy sandals/stick legged kids with horrors haircuts) take to the dancefloor. Six pm! Time for a spot of bump n grind to mid paced electro!
It’s not neccessarily a bad thing. But it’s not neccessarily a good omen for a Veils show.
Sorry you have to watch this sideways. I don’t know how to flip it.
At nine they started charging for entry. At ten, half an hour before we went on, the bar was rammed with people.
‘These aren’t Veils fans. Are they.’
‘I think……not….’
‘We can convert them. Maybe.’
There is a famous incident in Veils history, known as ‘the Southampton incident.’ It is unlikely that we’ll be invited back, was the upshot of the incident, whether we wanted to go or not. We did issue an apology at the time, but it probably wasn’t enough. I guess it’s a good thing that no incident of a Southampton-like nature occured in Reading. We’re older now. We’re professionals.
There’s always someone who makes you feel less like a douche. In this case there was a dark haired dude who seemed to be enjoying himself, and my favourite Australian journalist. But the fact that you feel like a douche, like playing your songs as best you can is pissing off the majority of the people present, who would prefer to be getting their groove on or at least having another shot of Bacardi and trying to rub up against someone attractive….it never makes you feel particularly….good…..or peaceful.
But it wasn’t the people in the bar’s fault. They were just out for an evening. Nobody has to listen to a band. If you pay to see a band, then maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense not to, but if you’re just at a bar and a band is playing…..
I bear no ill will toward the residents of Reading, is what I’m saying. Except whoever wrote that on the signup sheet. That’s just mean.
Oh.
This is Louisa:
She’s singing, gloriously, with us, at the moment. We Like Her. I like that when someone says ‘pretty good’ and I start the Larry David ‘pretty….pretty….preeetaaayyy…’ she’s with me before I’ve finished the first word.
6:21 am • 20 April 2009
Brighton. The Hope. 16.04.09
I’m starting a new thing where I’m gonna take a photo of every dressing room on the tour. I’ve already fucked it, by not taking one at Dingwalls or Guildford, but never mind.
I’ve been meaning to do it for ages - partly because back when I was a kidlet, I remember going to shows and imagining the band lounging on velvet couches backstage with an army of nubile servants attending to their needs and if I’d known the real deal I probably would’ve……actually it wouldn’t have changed anything but I would’ve been wiser. And wisdom, my friends, is the key, is it not?
And partly because occasionally you get a really good one (see: France, Belgium) and it’d be nice to give some credit.
And partly because I just think it’ll make a nice collection. I was going to do toilets as well, but then I forgot. So dressing rooms it is.
This was the kitchen of the bar. It might not look so salubrious, but the show was sort of lovely, and the people who run the Hope are superb. As is the promoter of both the London and Brighton shows, by the way. What a DUDE. Made lovely posters! Ran our Merch! High ratio of fruit in the rider!
Promoters. There is, I suspect, no group of people in ‘this little business…called….show…’ so prone to assholicness as promoters. Oddly I don’t remember once running up against a bad (and in this case bad usually means ‘festering’) apple in mainland Europe. Once we thought we had, in Germany, because we turned up and the dude was wearing, like, a mafia suit and black shades indoors at night and barely said hello to us and looked sort of disdainful. I ended up drawing the short straw and having to ask him if we could maybe have a bottle of wine or perhaps some Jaeger. He looked at me and said ‘white or red?’ in what I thought was the tone of someone who was going to pretend I hadn’t even said Jaeger because it was such a ridiculous request. I muttered ‘red’ and he walked off. I returned upstairs and informed everyone that we might get some wine but it didn’t look good.
Five minutes later a troupe of waiters appeared with two bottles of red and a bottle of Jaeger. It turned out the glasses were prescription, and we’d made the unfortunate but easy to make shyness/arrogance confusion mistake.
But for every hipster in a suit and shades who turns out to be lovely (see also: Skippy in New York, to whom we owe several very large favours) there’s a guy who you know for a fact is making ten grand off your show, stashes half the beer he’s ‘given’ you in a cooler by the side of the stage for him and his mates, and says ‘sure’ when you ask if you can maybe get another dozen or so ‘but the best I can do is charge you cost price.’
So it only seems right to give credit where much credit is due, to Adam, for being a genuinely lovely man in a profession where being merely decent makes you look like Jesus.
And that’s kind of it, about Brighton. It’s not really about Brighton at all, and there’s no mention of Dingwalls at all, is there. The most I can think of to say about Dingwalls is really about Marathon Bar. The thing with Marathon is that I only ever seem to end up there on nights that have gone spectacularly well. It’s like a secret level in Super Mario Brothers. Get a night to come off without a hitch, and suddenly the option will appear. ‘Would you like to go to Marathon Bar?’ YES I WOULD.
I missed the girl doing a striptease to Madonna by about five minutes, but the tramp with the square dog (wish I had a photo. It’s a dog. It’s basically square. Its name is Max) was still outside and Louisa (more later) was ordering vine leaves. Graham Sutton was passing around a plate of chicken and chips and Dan’s hairdresser (Dan: ‘Fuck I felt like a proper rock star on my way to the Marathon. I had an entourage. I was with my hairdresser.’) was drunk and hilarious. So yes. I liked Dingwalls, a LOT. Hope the surprisingly large number of people who were there liked it too.
5:12 am • 20 April 2009
Wilkinson Sword/That last post was really long.
What’s going ON?
I would like to read serious and literate opinions.It’s the leafblower bit that gets me.
Thank you to Ericka Duffy.
7:52 am • 8 April 2009
“Sun Gangs is like Barack Obama and Mufasa from The Lion King. “
Dan: ‘God, I’m so afraid when I open my emails in the morning and see REVIEW in all the subject lines.’
Me: ‘Do you guys read from the bottom up or the top down? Cos I read bottom up, which bit me in the ass the other day cos there was the NME one that was quite good -‘
(nods from the rest of the table)
’ - but then the next one up, and as it turned out the last one, was that Artrocker one that was kinda crap.’
Finn: ‘That’s the only crap one I’ve seen, I think.’
Me: ‘Yeah me too. But it kinda tainted my pleasure. What’s up with that anyway?’
Finn: ‘NME?’
Me: ‘Yeah. They don’t like us’
Finn: ‘Maybe they do now.’
Me: ‘Yeah. But then…..is that even a good thing?’
Everyone knows musicians are insecure, right? We’re famous for it. It’s why we have to take so many drugs and have sex with people below the official ‘theorem for judging the appropriate age of a person below ones own age’ (half your own age plus seven, I believe) guidelines.
Review time is scary. It shouldn’t be. We should be all Damn The Man about it, having Faith In Our Art. But surely it’s more of a rational, human thing to do to admit that, if everyone were to say Your Art Is Not Very Good, you’d kind of have to admit that perhaps it wasn’t? There’s probably yet another theorem, a ratio, of bad/good reviews, a level that’s ignorable as taste vagaries and people writing a review to a deadline with a hangover and not so much listening to the thing as playing the first four seconds of each track and guessing; and then a level that would overflow the bathtub of rejection, soaking our fragile egos in soupy realisation. YOU’RE JUST NOT VERY GOOD.
Thankfully the rejection bath is currently not very full at all. More of a rejection splash. A rejection bedpan.
Then there’s the bit where you’re going through the reviews skimming out the really impressive sentences for the obligatory ‘best of reviews’ that gets bandied around in promo stuff, sometimes ends up on stickers, and occasionally comes back to bite you in the ass in an interview on the radio where the DJ prefaces the thing with ‘they’ve been described as….[insert gushing, almost nonsensical string of positive adjectives], I’m here with The Veils! Hi!’ And we gulp and mutter ‘hi’, then proceed to be excruciatingly inarticulate for the five minutes it takes the DJ to realise we’re excruciatingly inarticulate and say brightly, with desperate eyes ‘here’s a song off their album!’.
I’d quite like to hear from someone who’s ever heard us/Finn/some combo on the radio. Is it as bad as it seems to us at the time?
Anyway. Where I was going is that I find internet reviews a lot more entertaining to read than print ones. Print ones seem to be an odd hybrid of overly wordy and utterly informationless, a lot of the time. The formula: 3 or so other band names (combination of: 1 pre 1989, 1 post 2005, 1 currently mega famous, 1 not very famous, 1 misc, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Echo and The Bunnymen v acceptable, 16 Horsepower in the Netherlands), adjective strings (recommend: ‘stirring’, ‘melancholy’) 1x early mention Bernard Butler, 1x late mention of his only producing one track….there’s your print review.
Whereas the internet ones… obviously they benefit from a larger word allowance, the ability to write the review at 3am in their pants and post it without anyone reading it over, and certain other freedoms, but they’re so much more entertaining. They’ve still got the references (Barry Andrews, very popular on the internet) but there’s so much…..more. So here’s my best of of Sun Gangs internet reviews, which don’t often make it into the ‘official’ best of, I guess because they’re often on random websites and people might think we just made them up.
Plus, if I’m honest, that 7/10 from the NME…..I was actually quite stoked. And I don’t even know why. I don’t even read it. I get quite angry if I try to read it. I used to read it. I remember all those years ago when the Strokes had just unleashed converse trainers and devastating handsomeness on music, seeing that copy of the NME they were on the cover of (it was newsprint, then) in Finn’s basement bedroom in Devonport Auckland and not being able to get the CD cos it wasn’t out in NZ yet and wanting SO BAD to know what that pretty man in the tight jeans was going to sing like cos of what they wrote about what he sung like….
Maybe I’m just old.
THE INTERNET: THE WRITING’S JUST BETTER
The quote at the top of this is from
Mish Mash Magazine, and that review also contains the phrases
‘As I continue to listen it is clear that ‘Nux Vomica 2: Vomica Harder’ - is not what the Veils had in mind for the third album.’
‘I would mention that frontman Finn Andrews is 25 years old (like me!) and his dad was in XTC (‘Making Plans for Nigel!”) and that this is his third album as main-dude for the Veils (not like me at all in any way!) and that not only does he have the pedigree and the chops but he’s also a handsome-ass motherfucker with a voice kind of like Win Butler minus the self-indulgence and all-knowing pomposity (maybe).”
‘Rammed with songs shot through with a laconic, mantis-like groove….’The Letter’ is the kind of widescreen anthem that Chris Martin would gladly nuke an orphanage just to get his spindly dabs on…..’Begin Again comes on like Leonard Cohen kicking Nick Cave and an orchestra down a liftshaft before going on to put the ‘epic’ in ‘epic win.’…Just because you robbed the grave doesn’t mean you killed the guy.’
4:13 am • 8 April 2009
‘This is like eating something labelled food poisoning’
The other night I had a long series of dreams loosely based on the movie Death Note. I encourage you to watch the movie, and its sequel, so that you too may have the same sorts of dreams. They’re based on a comic, and basically center around a notebook that is tossed down from the sky by a God Of Death into the hands of a clever and principled teenage boy.
Needless to say, it all goes a bit wrong. The boy ends up as a sort of Japanese cross between James van der Beek and a serial killer….he’s got a lovely girlfriend…..and then he gets a nemesis, who goes by the name of ‘L’. L is possibly my favourite character of all time in anything, and that list includes Spike out of Buffy, Bodie in the Wire and David Bowie’s Andy Warhol impression. It’s a strong field.
I’ve gotten a bit addicted to chinese supermarkets lately so spent a part of Saturday afternoon buying ‘english tea popcorn’ (delicious), ‘coco cherry’ (bearable) and talking people into pork buns, which were a sort of moderate success.
‘I like the bread’
‘I like the pork’
‘It’s like eating a breast implant.’
Sunday we had a Henning-less band practise. As someone on our myspace astutely noted, he’s ‘swanning around SXSW’, and thus it’s Finn, Dan, and me, left to our own devices, which means them poking around with amps and me reading the paper and occasionally reporting back.
‘Barack Obama’s car while he’s in London carries supplies of HIS OWN BLOOD.’
I would’ve been poking around with my own amp, but it was in the shop. As it turns out it’s not coming back from the shop.
‘It’s been on fire in two different places.’
Got a list of american dates through today. Or, not so much dates as places. A list of places. It looks good though.
The new Bill Callahan record is really good.
2:14 pm • 30 March 2009
Cutting and Sticking
There was a photo shoot we did a while back. It was for this Rankin thing where he’s taking pictures of a bunch of people - Andre 3000 through to Billy Bragg, and somewhere in between them, us - and getting them to ‘destroy’ (tastefully, mind. Or at least humorously. Presumably not utterly) the prints, then they’re going to be auctioned and the money given to Youth Music.Billy got his dog to eat his. Natalie Imbruglia wrote all over hers. Something about making her legs thinner, lips bigger, chest rounder, etc. With arrows. When we were there, her picture was around and I thought that she’d written on it genuinely, as a sort of list of requests, rather than as an artistic comment on the vicious and unrealistic nature of glossy photography in modern times.
Anyway. The man being who he is, our photo came out looking really rather nice. We were given prints of it a month or so ago, though we’re under strict instructions not to use the shots for anything until they say we can. There was debate about using it anyway because it’s probably the nicest group photo we’ve ever had done, and there’s all this album press coming out, and People Want Pictures but the idea of being sued by Rankin, publicity attracting as it might be, was a big enough stick to stop us. He probably spends more on haircuts in a week than I do on rent. Actually, he definitely does, because I don’t pay any rent. What a useless analogy.
We decided what we were going to do to ours ages ago. Finn sent around a hastily photoshopped version and everyone had hysterics and that was that. But the doing of it took until today, when I picked up the shiny (actually not shiny. Tasteful matte finish) page, bought ten craft knives and a ream of A4 paper for a pound apiece and went home to spend the afternoon slicing and gluing my way to ‘destructive’ nirvana.
If it’s a picture of the picture, can Rankin (or, I spose, his represetatives. Surely it’s not HIM scouring the internet to make sure we’re not slyly spreading it around. Though it does make a nice mental picture, him sitting in his pants at a desk first thing in the morning, cup of coffee, enormous list of names, google image searching them one by one…..how a modern empire gets made…) still be mad? Surely someone will send me a vicious email in the morning if so. I guess I could blur it out.
Did I blur it or is Rankin a crap photographer? Guess you better buy the print at auction and find out…
This is all going somewhere, I promise. Though where it’s going is that I really like how it turned out, which is a bit egomaniacal. But unless you go to the auction or buy the book you’re not going to see it otherwise. Which I suppose maybe someone might if they couldn’t just see it here. But some people don’t live in england. Oh fine, I’m depriving Youth Music of donations because I’m excited. But the book will have everyone else’s in it. Here’s how it went:
Some pictures of Steve Buscemi.
Trimmed to the appropriate size. My head is smaller than Henning’s.
But the only question is, is it better in black and white?
Or in colour? Colour is creepier, isn’t it. But I think I like the black and white.
6:21 pm • 24 March 2009
That video I was talking about
It’s actually worth keeping an eye on stereogum cos they quite often give away tickets to Veils shows in the states.
I just bought six mangoes for a pound. Now for what to DO with them.
8:59 am • 20 March 2009
