Mr Impostume, the Blog-reading public needs to know, are you now or have you ever been…. a Nick Cave fan?

Well…intermittently, though I found the sheer laziness of “Nocturama”, especially the justifiably reviled “Rock of Gibraltar” (“I met her in June, I bought her a spoon, we got married soon, then I looked at the moon,”) so hard to forgive that I never got round to checking out the apparently great “Abattoir Blues” at all, though I suspect Cave, having now entered the Pantheon will have the obligatory “Laughably Past It/ Stunning Return to Form” verdict passed on alternate releases until the day he’s interred in the great Bloooze Mausoleum in the sky along with Hank, Lenny, Bobby, et al. It was evident by the time the clunkily, cod-classically entitled “ And no more shall we part” (Nay and verily forsooth thrice nay shall we oh betrothed one!) that Cave was a spent force, his Apocalyptic baroque having modulated into a Mathew Arnoldish melancholy for a fallen world, (oh love, let us stay true to one another!) from Southern Gothic to sheepish Anglicanism in but a few years. While his much trumpeted marriage might have been a great way to keep Old Nick from worrying the heavy-duty padlocks on family medicine chest before breakfast had even been served, it seemed pretty disastrous for his song writing* (yes, that’s right I blame women and their petty domestic demands for emasculating the great Romantic artist that is man!) The muse now had to take her shoes off in the hall every time she came round and make polite small talk about how well the Azaleas were doing. The bowl of vomit that Cave claimed he was thematically chained to seemed to have been surreptitiously replaced with syrup, or worse still a very large mug of Ovaltine. In other words that most destructive of all middle-aged infirmities, contentment, had well and truly set in.

What then are we to make of “Grinderman,”** “Foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better,” Cave's attempt along with a couple of members of the Bad Seeds to rock out, kick ass, inject some guitar-based venom and vitriol into the sedate body politic of Coldplayed-out contemporary rock, to jack up again on the fire and brimstone of old ? Cave’s "Tin Machine”? A horribly public Mid-life crisis, Cave trying to prove that he can still thrash around in the beer dregs and scream the blood vessels in his eyeballs black as good as any young pretender (“I ain’t gots so old I cain’t lick any wun a you ornery young pups yet”, mumbles old Pa Cave on his way out of the dressing room.) Well, what indeed? The track the band put up on their MySpace page, “No Pussy Blues” seemed promising. It was of course largely ruined by Caves prolixity and general desire to be a scurrilous old wag, but there was a silvered, scraping weight to the big wah-wah riff that kicked in halfway through and even if the rhythm section was a trudge through a muddy Berkshire field in oversized Wellies, the possibility was there that an album’s worth of this stuff might up the ante and crank out some tastily souped up, squalling and squawking dirty Rawk. While it wasn’t going to be “Mutiny in Heaven” part two at least you could imagine that they might have a few nasty, guttural Garage tricks up their sleeve.

“Foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better.” Does it do what it says on the tin? As it stands it’s fulfilled fifty-percent of the bargain,“hairy, and damn well old enough to know better.” “No Pussy Blues” is not so much a taster of the album as its standout track. Bathos soughs horribly around in even the most generous listener as one track shuffles politely into the next and the promised noise and foulness fail to materialise. The percentage of hard-fast-loud tracks to lugubruious and sub-Bad Seedsy, love-is-redemptive, Winter-sunlight-in-the-conservatory windows, bathchair crooning is approximately fifty- fifty though sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart. The first track, the album presumably blasting off with evil fuzz-voodoo intensity, is just embarrassingly weak, and in Cave’s attempts to be both a Hellfire-fueled rabble-rouser as well as, you know, the grand-old-man-of-letters, deeply misjudged. Lyrically Leonard Cohen enervates the later Nick Cave in the same way Flannery O’Conner and Faulkner invigorated his earlier work in the Birthday Party and that wry, salacious, social-commentary side of Cohen ( “ First we take Manhattan” “The Future”, of which Cave is only ever a pale imitation anyway) dominates his performance on “Grinder man.” “All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the afternoon and maybe a bit more in the evening. We are scientists. We do genetics,” he deadpans on the plodding “Go tell the women.” On “Love Bomb” (all the titles are appalling, by the way) a “rocky” number, the pitfalls of Cave’s matrimonial life provide a series of mildly amusing diversions while the band trot out something that the Gun Club or the Fuzztones would probably have stuck on a B-side. During the moderately groovy,“Honey Bee,” he imitates a honey bee. “Honey bee let’s fly to Mars. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!”And this from the man who gave us, “ Oh god, please let me die beneath her fists!”

Nick Cave will never be entirely unwelcome round Impostume heights, we’ve known each other too long, and “Grinderman” is pleasant enough to listen to while you’re doing the ironing (not that I ever iron my clothes obviously. I don’t even wear clothes, I’m THAT rock and roll) certainly unlikely to loose him any listeners but equally unlikely to get back anyone who gave up after “ From Her to Eternity.”

So what are the Blogs saying, what’s the grassroots’ buzz?

Buy that Drones*** album instead.



* Clearly it’s not marriage per se that’s the problem, look at David Thomas****, never been more rancorous as far as I can make out. The problem is clearly being happily married.

** “ But surely that’s not released until next March, Mr Impostume!” Errrr..let’s just say it fell off the back of a lorry on the Information Super-highway.

*** Although hunting down a copy of “Ascension” by The Aints would probably make The Drones entire output instantly redundant.

**** After a recent Ubu gig during which Mr Thomas had ripped the filters off the pack of Marlboro he was chain smoking and, shall we say, comprehensively abused the audience (looked like it was going to be a fistfight at one point) I drunkenly and possibly foolishly complimented Mr Thomas on his recent, significant weight loss (he could now even move actual parts of his own body!) . “ I got a year to live,” he informed me.

Pere Ubu - We Have the Technology

How I wish we could take this moment & freeze it;
to come back to it again & again;
to hold it to the light;
to turn it in our hands;
to study all the angles;
to find out how & why it's gotta go the way that it goes
We have the technology not available before
We have the technology

Thinkers and poets of the past,
they had to leap into the dark so blindly,
whereas we'll stand free and upright like men...
The day's golden light!
Linked with our machines our eyes are beaming
It won't matter at all how weird things are seeming
We have the technology not available before
We have the technology

We need the means to dig deeper;
to search below the surface appearance of things...
Worlds never dreamed of!
Oh, what a wonderful life if, darlin, that moment might be found wherein we come unstuck so completely:
Flap A from Slot B,
slappin in the wind!
We have the technology not available before
We have the technology

David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - part 2

David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - part 1

This has been around for a while but figured it was worth exhuming here!

extract from Jason Phereus:

A Universal History (of Troutmask): the one where Mel Gibson fucks a tramp



Troutmask pulls out of the underground car park and onto a crowded Charring Cross Road, 11.43 Friday night, and sets off for the Savoy.
He is using the black BMW for the job.
All the necessary arrangements for his client's easy removal through the back of the hotel have been made.
The journey is short and uneventful. He pulls up and checks his watch. Two minutes early. He knows that this evening's client will be as punctual as he has always been in the past. Indeed, Mr Gibson is a stickler for punctuality.

Troutmask smiles through the tinted windscreen at the deserted street, its series of empty bays and quiet squares of lawn, the high railings behind which the cars cut along the Embankment and the Thames flows.

Sweet Thames flow softly on, flow softly now, softly, for our song is almost done.

What is he thinking? Impossible to say. Who can possibly divine the vast motions of his mythy mind? Perhaps he is simply reflecting on the success of this particular venture, a world-wide network of discrete services designed to fulfill the special needs of the very A-est of A-list celebrities.
His client list is extensive, the range of services unparalleled.

This is the third time, for example, that he has taken Mr Gibson on what Gibson himself likes to refer to as one of his "hunts", but he has also done much more than this. He supplied Richard Gere with a quality selection of mixed small rodents, a speculum and a tub of Ox-fat during his last stay in London, found live eels and Femidoms for Lisa Kudrow, regularly arranges for the same three black hermaphrodite midgets to be wheeled into Brad Pitt's hotel room hidden beneath the room service trolley.

His services are expensive, of course. -Missa Tloutmas he cha Top Dollah- as Lalida is wont to say, but Missa Tloutmas also pays top dollar. Keeping the doormen and porters at the Savoy in his pocket, is obligatory. Plus he has to pay enough to make selling information to the gutter-press for a one off payment financially unrewarding. The back dwarves are virtually full-time employees of www.discretecelebservices.com, receiving a generous monthly salary, pension plan and a performance bonus if Mr Pitt is particularly happy, if the golden showers have been of the temperature, colour and taste that is most to Mr Pitt's pleasure, if the fisting has had the bite and reach that sets Mr Pitt's soul to singing.

As long as the money's there, and they stay within the confines of the service, they're safe. Troutmask still remembers the dressing downs he had to give Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy for going AWOL and not using his L.A branch of DisCelebSer. Still, it proved a salutary lesson to almost everyone else on his books.

But Gibson is a little different, his peccadilloes are more hi-risk and less certain. He likes to be outside, he's an outdoorsy type, always has been ever since he was a kid hitching his way across the dead heart and experiencing his first bouts of alfresco hobo-love in the empty wagons of goods trains. He likes something more unpredictable, more authentic, riskier. Gibson's personal client manager and the organizations main Trampscout has been out searching the streets for a suitable quarry for a fortnight or so now and twenty-seven minutes ago, just as Troutmask was untangling himself from Dana Polatin and Lalida, he sent a message notifying Troutmask that everything had gone to plan, that he had prepared and isolated an appropriate "quarry" in the small back alley just a little further along the Embankment.

Troutmask looks round as the fire exit opens and an oblong of stale light falls over the black tarmac between the hotel's imposing back wall and his waiting car.

Mr Gibson jogs across the space between them clad in a loose, grey toweling leisure suit and sneakers. He has his hood up. His face is in shadow but as he approaches the car Troutmask can see that his lips are moving slightly, that his famous blue eye are narrowed into slits and shining with a dry, fevered heat, the first effects of the Stellarc Four capsule he swallowed just moments before .

A second later Gibson is in the back of the car, his hood still up, shading his face. Troutmask knows better than to speak and simply, as always, presses play on the in-car CD player and lets "Cheap Sunglasses" by ZZ Top, Gibson's absolutely favourite song of all time, from the album "DeGuello", flood the backseat.

Gibson is extraordinarily, violently paranoid, certain that he is being stalked by the agents of a nebulous and shadowy organization known only as RedZion. A Jewish-Communist network of global remit and unlimited resources, an organization about which he babbles in indiscreet moments at Hollywood parties and which his agents beg him not to mention on promotional junkets or at premiers.

A ludicrous fiction of course, the product of an almost moronically simple mind overloaded with religious zealotry, a pathological hatred of intellectualism and the kind of sado-masochistic, homosexual yearnings that would turn Yukio Mishima pale.

A ludicrous fiction, of course, were it not for the fact that Troutmask himself set up and founded RedZion in 1984 when he was still a tender but enormously rich neophyte of sixteen, and that many of its activities, including their surveillance and general hounding of Gibson are secretly funded directly from the revenues generated by www.discretecelebservices.com.
In such a way, Troutmask has explained, he feels that he maintains equilibrium in a universe which it seems, increasingly, it has fallen to him to control. Everything, he has tended to say, depending on which of his guises you are encountering him in, should aim toward this, "the uroborous principle", such closed-karma systems, he argues, are the very essence of justice.

This incarnation of Troutmask does not speak, instead, he simply sets off on the short journey of a minute or so to where Gibson's prey for the evening is waiting.

The wheels roll smoothly to a halt, the engine's throb diminishes, there is the thunk and whirr of door lock. Troutmask emerges from the car and checks the area, does a quick spot of recon and almost immediately locates the Tramp exactly where the TrampScout said he would be, heavily drugged with precisely measured doses of Rohypnol and liquid Viagra.
Troutmask has been making a fortune through the www.fempowerment.com ("For when "NO" is a No-no.") website, knocking it out in capsule form, colloquially known as "Sammies" after Sex and the City's rapacious main predatrix, to female date-rapists across Europe and the States. It really took off once his marketing team hooked up with Jordan for an ultra-secret promotional campaign, in which Gareth Gates became the first, unwitting, high-profile measures of its efficacy.

The Tramp is face down in a small alleyway between the buildings, his legs sticking out from behind a blue plastic recycling bin. Troutmask double-checks a schematic of the area on his palmtop for CCTVs. None. But still, they'll have to be fast.

"Five minutes Mr Brown,"Troutmask says, using Gibson's preferred nom de amour as he eases open the back door and his client bounds out, a long strand of drool, like spun silver in the moonlight, swinging from his lips, his eyes cleanly ablaze with Stellarc Four. In a matter of seconds he's sprinted across the twenty feet or so that separate him from his "quarry" and fallen upon him.


Gibson hunkers down, breath raw in his throat, the Stellarc Four coating every nerve like Napalm and rolls The Tramp over onto his back. Though Gibson has been suffering from chronic erectile dysfunction since his early twenties, under the influence of the Stellarc Four his cock, a modest five inches and, naturally, uncut, is hard enough now to strike sparks off the brickwork.
He is saying to himself over and over, "And was not out lord Jesus Christ who gave of his life on the cross at Calvary just such a one as these?"

The Tramp is fully bearded as per his requirements and so Gibson roles him back over, starts tugging The Tramp's trousers down, a pair of damp, shit-caked suit pants held up with loosely knotted string that soon unravels under the pressure, falls into the pulped cardboard on which The Tramp lies and coils itself around an empty dog food tin.

He draws a deep breath, ready to submerge himself, to plunge face-first into the stygian gloom of The Tramp's arsehole, inhales the heady, blood-quickening, primal stench of deeply impacted rot, of unwashed folds agleam with spores and webbed with fungal blooming.

Gibson's snout goes truffling hungrily into the richly variegated hollow of the Tramp's arsehole. The stench is overwhelming, almost overpowering. Tears spring up in his eyes.

He opens his mouth and receives upon his very tongue the thickly matted central sprig of hair, almost a horn, that spears his soft palate and then slowly softens and separates as he sucks on it, swallowing the bitty run off in luxuriantly oily gulps. Tramp gravy.

He works his tongue through the softening mesh and burrows further in, gets his first lick at the Tramp's arsehole.

Strewth! For a moment his tongue recoils from the mound, the heap, the tented rubble clogging the cave mouth, more bitter than Rue. Then, gingerly, flicking with the tip he begins to break it up a little, chipping loose a shard here, a boulder there, the muscles at the back of his tongue straining.

Too slow. Gibson knows he will have to use his teeth. He grasps the Tramp's buttocks, yanks them wide apart with his strong hands. Something sprays his forehead and he raises his eyes to see the wet, red weal of a freshly burst blister, a blister whose salty, amber effluent comes trickling down, sluices around the base of the impacted shit mound, partly loosens its foundations. A stroke of luck. After a few seconds Gibson has chewed and sucked the last of the obstruction away and spat it to one side.

A bright, white grub writhes from the very center of the Tramp's arsehole and then quickly burrows back in. Gibson plunges after it, kisses those bruised and sourly puckered lips, thrusts his tongue a little way between them, the arsehole loosening under the pressure with a sigh and a sulfurous waft. Who knows what rare, blind life forms live within, what softly pale, tubular treats?

He begins to suck.

The Stockholm Monsters - The Longing

Right! That's enough now!
just check out supremelovegods you tube stash. It's radio rental. Big time.

Nice Strong Arm - Framingham

I mean really, who knew!

Thin White Rope - Red Sun

For PMPEP!

Cop Shoot Cop - Shine On Elizabeth

Who even knew this existed! I dedicate it to me Mum!

Shudder to Think LIVE 'The Hair Pillow'

Audios not great but if you know the song or ever saw the four guitar incarnation of STT live, it will strike home. loads more on you-tube, won't convert any skeptics but for initiates it's one delight after another. Ahh 1992!

Jeru Tha Damaja - Me Or The Papes

Jeru Tha Damaja - You Can't Stop The Prophet

Jeru The Damaja - D Original

shame he was a dismal old homophobe eh? Maybe he's seen the light a la Buju.

Jeru The Damaja - Ya Playin Yaself

Ahh fuck it, lets have another. Those first two Jeru albums are mighty and probably he's already a hip old-Skool name to drop as hip-hop goes all anti-Bling and "educationalistic."

Jeru tha Damaja

According to blissblog, Scritti are currently doing a live version of this track (a personal fave.)T.M.B. Now that I have to hear, I can only beg someone to post some bootleg footage on you-tube!

Act - Snobbery & Decay

For Owen!

Another extract f rom Jason Phereus

“Thanks,” Dana says as Dave fumbles the folded up papers back to her and she slips them again into the pocket of her Cargo pants. “Something my friend Eden sent me.”

“Eden,” Dave nods enthusiastically. “Is that a friend or a female friend or a boy friend, not in the sense of boyfriend I mean but rather boy………..FRIEND, the opposite of a female friend, so, well really that would be a male friend except that girl friend in the….”

Dana is looking at him. Ok, sure. He seems to have just ticked down to a standstill, mouth half-open now, waiting for her to speak

Sooooo…..OK. “Sure, so basically it’s a friend of mine, a girl………….FRIEND,” they both smile, “ but not a GIRLfreind.”

Not a GIRLfriend, that would be too weird, though maybe Eden is a little bi-curious herself and Derren has been trying to get the two of them to come round to his dingy lurrve pad to get some three-in-a-bed, ménage a trois action going on, which she can’t even believe he would have like, the temerity to suggest, implying that she would be happy to like A) sleep with her best friend who she has known forever and who is certainly totally HOT but who Dana Polatin does not look at in that way at all and so but anyway also B) that if they did get up to any girl-on-girl stuff they would want Derren around basically ruining it with his sweaty ogling and like general cluelessness about the female body that his endless hours of online research and semi permanent Porn watching doesn’t seem to have improved even half a little bit. Not that she like, objects to the idea in principle at all, or can deny she has been in a similarish, by accident, situation with Derren and Jana after a heavy smoke up one Friday night when Derren’s Rents where out like worshipping Satan at some black-tie Masonic Blood Drinkers thing, but that was like almost nothing to do with her, initiation wise, I mean there she is just flat out on the couch watching one of Derren’s dumb Judas Priest DVD comps when the next thing you know they’re both kind of totally unfairly taking advantage of how small and light she is and dragging her off it backwards and carrying her onto the Sofa bed where they have been whispering away to each other and like particularly grossly and noisily making out and Jana has been kind of very annoyingly giggling every couple of seconds with Derren forcing more Rum and Orange juice or whatever it was he’s been getting them drunk on that night, plus his pretty nasty, nicotine flavoured tongue, down her throat as Dana Poaltin keeps her eyes fixed on the screen, Rob Stupid Halford’s stupid bald head gleaming in the stage lights, feeling maybe a little pissed off sure that they are so obviously making out while she’s around even if Jana is basically a basket-case and Derren is a monumental asshole who she dated for two nanoseconds and basically has no interest in whatsoever but equally she doesn’t at that particular moment want to give either of them the satisfaction of making them feel like she cares or they have the power to bug her in some way.

Still they’re bugging her now as Jana starts trying to French kiss her and Derren is like grabbing at both their asses at the same time and keeps pushing their heads together every time Dana Polatin pulls back because he like saw Matt Dillon do it in “Wild Things” with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards which he thinks is just the coolest thing because its like if I want two bitches to kiss I just push those bitches heads together man, and off they go, it’s my magic bitch touch and Dana Polatin is too out of it at first to really know what she’s doing so she sort of starts kissing Jana back who if she’s honest she isn’t really that into in anyway, but maybe also just to not start looking like she’s freaked out or can’t handle it and is pretty sure that Jana who still has both eyes open and is watching Derren’s reaction all the time is in the same situation as Derren kind of takes off his t-shirt and collapses back against the wall now with his rum and orange juice in its like dumb plastic beaker in one hand and one leg folded under the other, like watching the whole show that his bitchez are putting on just for very special, regal Derren, lord of the dingy basement pad that always stinks of damp and unwashed clothes, old sneakers, sweat and bong smoke, rancid cum. But still even though she may think Jana is basically kind of a skank, and even though Derren is an asshole, she allows herself to have her t-shirt pulled off over her head, getting a moment’s relief from the way Jana is basically chewing at her face and slathering her lips and chin in spit with her pretty gross, cow-sized tongue, because she figures as well that hey Jana is totally flat-chested so that at least Dana Polatin has got one over on her there, so she starts to peel Jana’s top up over her head too, wondering just how far they are going to go along this road that like no-one but asshole Derren wants them to take and suddenly feeling, locked lip to lip with Jana, like a total puppet and also kind of trapped and angry which is not how she should feel about the whole thing at all when suddenly Jana’s breaking away from her and spinning, hand up to her mouth spraying out a little jet of rum-brown barf between her fingers and lunging for the bathroom, as Derren starts yelling, “get it in the toilet man, don’t you puke on my floor!”