Britain’s Sixth Best Graveyard Tour Guide

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SONGS FROM THE BACKSEAT

4:  Nine, Whutchu Want?

https://youtu.be/zTp8PaEdVTM?feature=shared

We learn to mythologise ourselves at an early age. Once it becomes apparent the rough and objectionable form that life will take, we start to carve out bigger, more legendary narratives from the raw materials at hand.

Like most, I was captivated by road-trip narratives. The romanticism, and potential. The sense of propulsion; movement. Missions with opaque objectives.

Trapped in home-counties villages, cars provided us escape velocity from the fields, lanes and hedgerows. Anything that I could configure as a road-trip, I would. Teenage mixtape soundtracks blasting from tinny backseat speakers.

One summer holiday in between years at university, Vicky came over. Vicky loved to drive. Her dad owned a second-hand car dealership and would sometimes let her test drive new arrivals. This day, she turned up in an open-top jeep, wanting an adventure. Joe and I were sunning ourselves in the garden, drinking gin and smoking filthy strong Gitanes. Aiming (failing) for new wave sophistication.

Joe suggested we drive to Southampton where he was at university, to see if any of his mates were around, and to visit a hideous American diner called JFKs.

This was an honest to goodness road-trip. And we had the perfect soundtrack. Joe and I were obsessed with Nine’s ‘Whutchu Want?’, and we blasted the tune all the way down, along with Cypress Hill and the Gravediggaz.

‘Whutcha Want?’ IS jeep music. It rolls and swaggers, bouncing on its endlessly catchy, Staples Singers sampling hook. It’s quintessential 90s party hip hop, with Nine’s deceptively adept growl bragging, boasting and threatening all in the same jovial fashion. A barrelling, unstoppable flow. It just bumps – addictively, insistently. As soon as it finishes you flip it back.

Leaning out the jeep, flying down the A27 next to the coast. Feeling legendary. Feeling mythical. Even for a minute.

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Scottish Friction 2: Beats (Brian Walsh, Kieran Hurley, Cristian Ortega, Lorn Macdonald, 2019)

You don’t need to believe that Donald Dewar sat in a wee room with Tony Blair and dreamt the Scottish Parliament just to scunner the development of a parallel Scottish politics, but… if that was the plan, giving politicians hostile to the UK an arena in which to make an arse of themselves AND/OR run up against (and thus buy into) the limits of their managerial positions might be a start, eh?

“Our party, New Labour. Our Mission, New Britain.”

We were talking about potential last week, right? A movie about two wee guys with different prospects having a big night at the fag end of the rave era, Beats knows the score. Flashback to you and your pal on the ground, arms round your heads, warding off swings from the baseball bat. Was it the brother or some other fucker holding it? Nevermind. Nomatter. “Know your role, shut your hole.” Bruised flesh solidarity.

Then, somehow: the soft shock of a kiss, an act performed through some fundamental hostility to intimacy.  Questions of what life might be suddenly open again. “Aye. It’s no been done by us, but.” 

The (post)industrial setting is key. The way the dreams of steel beams creep into the big trip near the end. The irrepressible blowout reworked so it functions as part of the system, just enough violence at the edges to make its fleeting nature both obvious and undeniable. Slip your They Live glasses on and you'll see big Tony Blair on the telly saying "If that was your fun, you've had it".

Beats can handle the “where are they now?” stuff in an epilogue. Pithy. Poignant. Good use of the form. If we’re to see past the bars they’ve made for us, though, we’ll need to take another shape entirely…

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Keep an eye out! McDaid EXCLUSIVE coming SOON!!

Misty morning, clouds in the sky/Without warning, the wizard walks by

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Tales From 500 Songs

When John Cale left the Velvet Underground, he was replaced by Doug Yule, who the group's manager thought might be the secret to making them a huge commercial success -- he was traditionally good looking and had a sweet, melodic, voice, and sang lead on a handful of songs on their next couple of albums. He would also actually act like a rock star on stage and try to please the crowds, something none of the other band members ever bothered doing.

Yule absolutely idolised Lou Reed, and started picking up his mannerisms, he was almost trying to *be* Lou Reed. When Reed didn't show up for a show (he hadn't told the rest of the band he was quitting) it was natural for Yule to switch to guitar, they got in a new bass player, and they carried on touring as The Velvet Underground for another year. 

At one of those shows in New York was a young fan, David Bowie, on his first trip to the US. Bowie stood right at the front of the stage singing along to every word of every song, to show his idols how big a fan he was. He then went and knocked on the dressing room door. After talking to one of the other band members, he asked if he could have a word with Lou Reed. The band member looked quizzical, but then "Lou" came out and spent ten minutes talking to Bowie about songwriting, without the younger man ever realising it wasn't Reed. He said later "It doesn’t matter really, cos I still talked to Lou Reed as far as I was concerned."

The next year, Bowie produced Transformer, the breakout solo album for the real Lou Reed -- at least as far as he knew.

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DOOMED SUMMER: ‘…don’t be the weapon they use to harm you.’

Cartesian Dualism is a monstrous infection. Federici outlines the utility for establishing capitalism. Alienation from our bodies enables exploitation of the body. Making animals mindless automata, incapable of actual suffering, enables their exploitation. Then it’s no great effort to move women and non-white, non-European people closer to animals on the hideous hierarchy. 

Cliff Steele, Robotman, Automaton, ostensibly body/mind duality in action is one of those characters whose humanity intensifies the more their humanity is assaulted. He is Ben Grimm, the morality of Kirbyanity. 

Cliff’s repeated initiatory ordeal is crossing the abyss, ‘nothing can pass through without being broken down… a seething chaos of incoherent signals.’ By the end he is doing it with ease. The anti-climax of defeating the Chief’s grand plan is because Cliff now understands. It still costs but it’s a cost he can pay.  

One of the first times we see, falling like rain into Jane’s underground, bronze-knighting rescue mission. ‘I’m not a man!’ criticised as Morrison’s gender essentialism, now patronisingly passed as exploration of their own confusion. Instead, the sacrifice of ego, everything Cliff clings to, denied from concern for his friend. He remains a living weapon. He remains a danger. His sacrifice buys momentary trust. 

But initiation doesn’t buy magical change. Forever dead-naming Rebis and erasing Eleanor Poole. Remaining the shield, the one who’ll take all the damage because he’s been so damaged. ‘I can’t feel anything!’ screams Cliff smashing his head into a wall, feeling too much, feeling in all the wrong places.

Cliff’s hell the mechanistic drudgery of the Ant Farm transcendent. Cliff should be happy flooded by the sensory paradise of supermarkets. The mundane isn’t hell in Morrison it’s lack of meaning.   

The first sacrifice is our decision to continue to live. The second sacrifice is our decision to continue to care. 

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Piñatas

Piñatas are a fun way to reward children for violence but I do have two problems with these colourful cardboard casualties. They cost a tenner (without the sweets) and they're usually made in the shape of a donkey, a star, a unicorn or other loveable symbol that doesn't deserve getting hit to shits with a stick. This week I turned a box of Bran Flakes inside out then called it a piñata. I drew some guys on it who looked like they could do with a kicking. 

Here's Braxton Humphries.

Braxton is 36 and still lives with his mum. Despite never having done anything for himself ever, he still thinks the world is unfairly weighted against him. Last week when his mum was driving him to Pets At Home to buy him a new Chinchilla (his third replacement this month) he saw a homeless man begging outside the Aldi and, assuming he was an immigrant, flew into a rage about all the housing and jobs he was stealing. When he got home he got into an argument online about Pokemon. Braxton took his frustration out on the chinchilla so his mum had to take him to buy a new one. Braxton is now barred from Pets At Home. 

Here's Leigh Taylor

Leigh peaked when he was five. He was the biggest boy in his class and loved throwing his weight around, making classmates play what and how he wanted. Within a year the other kids learned to avoid him so he became a lonely bully. At the age of 49, Leigh is still trying to get back to that glorious time before everyone hated him by shouting at children. He doesn't like anything but pretends to like football. 

HAVE AT THEM, KIDS!

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Good afternoon. 2025 has been the best year in rap music since 2011 already - new Redman, new Ghost, new Clipse(!!!), new Raekwon, new Tyler, new Earl, new Gibbs, some great first and sophomore LPs, just outrageously full - and there are still about 3 Alchemist projects to drop and god knows, Boldy James and LaRussell may well release another six albums before Hogmanay (as they call it.)

BEST COMPLIMENTS DEPARTMENT: I WAS TOLD THIS WEEK - “YOU’RE SO PERFECT.”

(MAY HAVE BEEN FREUDIAN BUT UNBEATABLE NONETHELESS.)

Just been speaking to the national librarian who that odious arsehole Rowling has called “the Taliban of gender” for not centring whatever compendia of bigotry she contributed to in the collection - a great choice imo. There isn’t really any compromising with these people, only backsliding, unfortunately, because it’s basically the same as agreeing everyone outside a refugee hotel has legitimate concerns and definitely are not a bad ’un with loads to hide, i.e. shite.

I JUST WANT A GF WITH AN OHOTMU FACT FILE… ONLY THEN SHALL I LEARN… “ABSOLUTE HUMILITY”

Read the first volumes of Absolute Batman and Ultimate Black Panther this week - I said before and will again, these comics do have the political dimension (in which we are absolutely fucked, corporate playthings) bang to rights and it is an interesting sphere for superheroics, in which most every protagonist is a terrorist - BP kinda boring and it’s a bit confusing to have two Storms in your universe but on the other hand she is an absolutely pantheistic superhero who beat Cyclops without powers to become leader. Batman very good, over the top, Snyder has managed to finally cut up his flights of prose small enough to flow, a very effective comic about fightin’ from the bottom up.

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St. Bartholomew’s light body

Patron Saint of summer’s end and vanquisher of Astaroth, Barry’s skin was demanded by his god both to prove his faith and to reveal the body beneath the body. Stripped down to the wine by an Armenian flenser, depictions show him holding his torturer’s instrument, turning it in his wrist until it becomes a quill, writing a gospel of uncensored heresy on his own hide in red ink. Sometimes, for more delicate sensibilities, his skin is glossed as draped robes or hanging carpet. Uneasy reading, but summer is getting longer, hotter, heavier and his cult will only spread as the century matures.

August is the last month of summer but the first of autumn. Animals and humans drink from the same pools, tempers on a steady simmer. Enough to make you cut your skin off. The long weeks of warmth, light and humidity have forced too much energy into nature, which surges, groans and threatens to burst under its own excess. Tall wheat, grain pods bulging and pleading for death, yearn to be threshed into another state and released from the pressure of growth. The grass chooses nonexistence, to become warm bread or cold beer, become gone and fused and onward. So he is a saint of earth, fecundity and harvest too; husk in hand, a map of agricultural technology. 

But in the mornings now, before the sun and all his dogs chase the heat back into the day, there is a cold that shouldn’t be here yet. You feel it at the top of hills, or where the roads grow narrow and speed the wind, scattering brown leaves, already dead. 

Later, in his temple, with the sun at its still-punishing peak. The leaded window on the western wall is coffin shaped, and its reflection illuminates the glass covering his portrait opposite. The light and surfaces are irresistible to the eye of a camera phone, which captures it without my meaning. The light body, revealed in its true form: organs wrapped in linen, bound with reeds, afloat.