Farewell to the Crops

Fantastic session from Electricity in Our Home son the first Hello Goodbye show after the summer break today - go and see them supporting Wire at the Scala on Monday if you can.
Great night at the Enterprise for the Crops swansong, T-Lo's birthday bash and the launch of 'The Beast Must Die', with a brilliant performance from the Great Blondini, who is best described as Tommy Cooper meets Roger Melly. Sterling work on the wheels of steel from the Wild Man too. A very enjoyable night all round in fact and good to see so many old faces, including all three Heave bassists! Not feeling sad to have finished, but pleased to have gone out on a high note, rather than a bum note (though there were a few of those too!). Off to Greece now for a week of well earned relaxation!

Teens at the Tate

XX Teens played at late at the Tate last night accompanied by cane-wielding dancers dressed as mummies with birdcages on their heads. And why not?

Que la bête meure

Final ever Crops rehearsal last night, which went worringly well...hopefully not a bad omen. Tomoland was in attendance to document the historic and rare tri-blogged occasion, and Jolly came along for a private view as he'll be in Wales tomorrow. Picked up copies of the album today...Smell the Glove is here! Come and get one for free tomorrow night at the Enterprise in Haverstock Hill!

Sex Pistols

When the Pistols split up in 1978, I would never have been able to imagine myself cycling across London at the grand old age of 44 to see them, in their fifties, play live again. But there we were last night - me, T-Lo and former Heaver Gavin, who we bumped into outside the gig. Playing in front of a backdrop of two giant combine harvesters, the band ripped through most of their back catalogue (i.e. the whole of Never Mind the Bollocks, a couple of b-sides, a few covers and 'Belsen was a Gas' reworked as 'Baghdad was a Blast'), with John Lydon camping it up like a chortling punk rock pantomime dame. This is pretty much why the Pistols still work as a live experience - the set is absolutely solid, with no danger of being diluted by new songs (though the encore versions of Silver Machine and Roadrunner were admittedly a bit flabby). The sound was crisp and loud and demolished the myth that the Pistols couldn't play - they could at the time and they still can. I suppose that in a way the gig was like punk rock's answer to 'The Good Old Days', but 'God Save the Queen' blasting out a full volume still sends a shiver down the most cynical of spines and reaffirms the Pistols as national treasures.

Ice Cream For Crow

Here I am enjoying a delicious diabetic ice cream in sunny Swanage, where we visited Doctor Love for a herbal consultation, poker classes and gallons of red wine. There could be bad news for the diabetic ice cream industry though: scientists claim to have cured diabetic mice by wiping out their defective auto-immune cells and thereby allowing them to produce their own insulin again. Sounds promising, but I imagine it will be a while before the process is approved for humans so in the meantime I'm seeing what Goat's Rue can do for me.

Nueva Cruz

Pedalled down the Old Kent Road to see Attack! Switch Attack! once again on very fine form, this time at the New Cross Inn. Been a while since I last had a night out in SE14. It didn't look much like the new Shoreditch last night, thank God.

Sit on it, Little Dorrit

Another Crops rehearsal last night - more work to do before the 6th but we're getting there. The LP has now been retitled 'The Beast Must Die' and will feature The Wenhaston Doom on the cover. Went off to Ilisa's birthday knees-up afterwards, where there was a rather disturbing outbreak of fonzing. The BBC are filming some of Little Dorrit at my work and the squirrels are feasting on the sandwiches discarded by the picky spoilt Victorian extras.

Skinny the Pooh

Inspired by a post on Callaghan's blog earlier in the summer, I finally got some pictures of the ice cream van at Surrey Keys shopping centre. Is the bear of very little brain suffering from some kind of wasting disease or is this simply an attempt to sidestep copyright? Interestingly, D.Duck seems slightly more resistant to the illness and/or litigation. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for further examples of badly executed Disney characters promoting ice cream.

For good measure, I'm also throwing in a picture of Radar's underpants flying high above a pin the tail on the donkey on Brighton beach last Saturday. Enjoy.

Crops Circle

The first Crops rehearsal in over a year last Thursday went from very shaky beginnings to passably acceptable interpretations of the songs to a very satisfying session in the Roebuck afterwards, joined by SS and Alfie. The Crops farewell gig is set for 6th September at the Enterprise in Chalk Farm, so we've got a couple of weeks to get ship-shape. The gig will also be the launch of our album, 'Foxes Earth and Badger Sett' (though it's also TV Magick's birthday so perhaps a 45 would have been more appropriate). Anyhoo, everyone who turns up gets a free copy...if we get it all done in time.

Halesworth

Following Gordon Brown's lead, we've just spent a very relaxing few days in Suffolk, staying at the Tit Low House in Halesworth. Listened to Julian Cope's 'Jehovakill' a lot and also spent a fair amount of time consulting Roger Melly's 'Magna Farta'. When not indulging in these highbrow pursuits, we went rowing on Thorpeness Meare and visited the mysterious ruins at South Elmham Minster. I also bought singles by Sailor, Pilot and the Wombles in a charity shop in the fine old town of Bungay and ate a lot of chips. In many ways it was a good old fashioned English summer holiday, complete with windy beaches, dragonflies and more photo opportunities with cats.

Grindleford Station Cafe

Made a pilgrimage to the legendary Grindleford Cafe in Derbyshire on Saturday. It's a proper unreconstructed British cafe serving pints of tea and coffee and enormous portions of suitably unhealthy fodder. The interior is festooned with cheerfully grumpy signs in Shrigley-esque handwriting instructing customers not to take too many serviettes or to browse the magazines without buying. Fortunately I'd also taken my bike with me on the trip so was able to offset the lashings of white bread and fat with a bit of pedalling around the Notts/Derbyshire border alps, so no harm done!

Blue Sky Thinking

It's been a week of balancing the cycling ying with the boozing yang. Had a few pints of Adnams in Chalk Farm with Judge Ed early in the week followed by 3.5 pints of Aspell (staying loyal to Suffolk brands) in Crystal Palace while discussing artwork for the forthcoming Crops LP with Dan and T-Lo in Crystal Palace on Wednesday night. Out for a 36 mile post-dynamo tootle around the North Downs with Spratticus yesterday, which was very much like going for a bike ride in the school holidays, but with pub stops! Clocked up another 22 miles today riding from home to dentist to the Moat to home to the barber's and home again. I seem to be getting the balance about right as the old blood sugars are behaving themselves again.