Jayne later formed Pink Military Stand alone- who I saw do a cracking gig at Middlesbrough Rock Garden- and later Pink Industry.

I asked Jayne a few questions.

PDB) Can you pitch me the life and times of Jayne Casey in 25 words or less?

Jayne C) I ‘m the cat that’s enjoyed many lives….

PDB) Which posters did you have on your wall when you where 16?

Jayne C)I was in a children’s home ‘no posters allowed’ but it would have been Bowie. Bolan and Hendrix

PDB) Erics. What was that all about?

Jayne C) It was a magical portal where a generation of Liverpool musicians discovered the lexicon of life .

PDB) Which of your own musical adventures has been the most satisfying?

Jayne C) Mmmm ‘ Maybe I’m just like my mother she’s’ never satisfied’ …

PDB) The Beatles : Inspiration or burden?
Jayne C) Both … Roger Eagle who owned Eric’s told us in 1977 never ever  to listen to them…..
So although i have obviously heard loads of their music  in the background …To this day Me , Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie have never purposely pressed play.

PDB) How did Big In japan get together?
Jayne C) In 1976 Ken Campbell (RIP) the theatre director produced a play from a trilogy of cult books by Robert Anton Wilson called ‘The Illuminati’
It took place in a semi derelict warehouse on Matthew Street  where I had a vintage clothes shop.  Bill Drummond was the set designer,  Ian brodie was the guitarist in the band
and I had a bit part  in the play. Ken used to beg me to be the singer but i wouldn’t do it cos I really couldn’t sing. After Ken left town Bill  continued to hound me and eventually I gave in and we formed Big In Japan.

PDB) Did you get narked when that Alphaville song was a hit?

Jayne C) No .. I groaned pulled the quilt over my head and turned over …

PDB) ) The brilliant NME PMSA cover- by Kev Cummins-  when Paul Morley interviewed iyou s part of my 80’s iconography. I even remember seeing Did You See her? in Woolworths in Hpool! What was that period like for you?

Jayne C) It was a weird period before the digital revolution kind off ‘ on the cusp’ you could see the future and it looked  very different but it was still way in the distance…
it was  frustrating musically as it was really hard to find musicians who’ got it’  so although  I really like the content of Pink Military  I wish Ihad ditched the drummer for a drum machine and got rid of all the middle eights… but I accept  it is very much of its time ….. The NME interview  was really interesting  with its Post Modernist headline  It came out in Jan 1980 so it was the  first NME of the 80’s  and in many ways  it  heralded  the change that the 80s would bring..

PDB) What does Jayne Casey do on a Tuesday afternoon?
Jayne C) I work in and around culture so my working life is varied and  unless i am in the middle of a big project  I don’t do Monday’s ….So Tuesday is the start of my working week by Tuesday afternoon i am normally throwing daggers at my 19 year old PA who after a long weekend of partying is  trying desperately to hide her obvious lack of serotonin  : )

Mezzanine Floors, The Pink Military website is here:http://www.cromar.org/pink.htm

Listen to Suicide A Go Go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCDUq0fDBSc&feature=related

Eric’s website is here: http://www.ericsclub.co.uk/Home.html

“I’m not much for bios, because, who cares? It’s the work that matters. I had a piece in disenthralled. I’ll take any chance to push Walter Conley’s work. Walter’s a righteous fucker. Otherwise I’m working out somewhere in America punching bears.”

It might’ve been summer or it might’ve been winter—I tend to think, though, that it was autumn—that the idea that’d been so bandied around in one form or another, the ‘Let start a band’ idea, took actual shape.
Thing is, a lot of shit I’d scribbled around, drivel I’d squatted into spiral notepads, I’d written on napkins, the side spaces of leaflets, brochure fronts, the fucking spunk I’d set down in my school textbook margins, I finally condensed into little songs, gave some bullshit titles to. Lousy lyrics, most of them, some decent two or three lines mixed in—indecipherable twaddle my older brother had gotten his hands on, went ahead and made some crumbly recordings out of.
There were lines like

Why don’t you sit next to me
like when we watched
Midsummer Night’s Dream

culled from life—I’d sat next to some girl at my school’s performance of the play, a miraculously fucked up thing to watch, the bits where some characters should’ve been singing all just done as spoken word. I liked the lyric quite a lot.
But there were other bits just got stuck in my head, I wished to fuck would get out, such as:

There
in down the road

by the streetcar furnished sunset

No sense to them and I hated to fuck the tune I’d set them to. Dead end lyrics I kept tooling with and tooling with, couldn’t get shut of.
Odds are it was definitely autumn when my brother got the four-track machine and a few real microphones.  I rather liked the haze of recording lyrics and guitar all at once, though I knew that the artificial drum beats from a Casio would have to be spliced in later—or set down first—so I soon got into the multi-track thing.
I loved the black snap boxes for the microphones, never bothered to learn the difference between Uni-directional and Omni-directional, but liked the silver Omni-directional microphone the most—it was colder, heavier, drained more of my voice. It was a fucking joke what a dipshit I was, how I’d either forget to turn the switch On or else would click it Off someplace mid-squawking, always feeling the expurgated take, had it not been so unfortunately truncated, would’ve been the perfect motherfucker, the one where I sounded like a singer really singing.

Primary reason I’d spend the entire lunch period in the downstairs toilet had really fuck to do with shyness, being put-upon, singled-out by fuckers, any of that; it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t interested in mixing with people on the strength they seemed like a bunch of boring cockfuckers.
Fact was, there were not so many people at lunch, there was never particular danger of all the toilet stalls filling, a line forming so that it’d be noticeable to someone four back in queue that mine was the only stall never did seem to empty out.
Fact was, time had no drag on me; seemed a minute to wait out fifty in the stall by the grate covered window—five minutes was already ten, so when ten came it felt ten was later than ten, longer than ten, fifteen was easily twenty, twenty the half-hour, the half-hour more than half of the whole time, the count down from fifteen minutes until the bell might as well have been a count down from five minutes, because I’d count down from five three times, which more or less was the equivalent of doing it just once. By this math, lunch was done at twenty minutes in, so what in fuck else was there to do? It legitimately took five minutes to have a shit, could easily stretch to ten to fifteen, the same fifteen that might for all the fuck it mattered be twenty.
I always meant to bring in some notepad, some sketchpad, but this’d be the dead on give away, queer the whole deal. I had to leave the duffle bag I used for my books out somewhere at the risk of its being pawed through or else I’d draw suspicion.
Eventually some dickheads in third year did accost me while I was washing my hands with ‘Hey why do you stay in the bathroom?  Do you have some intestinal problems or something? Something wrong with your dick?  Waiting for someone or something?’  I didn’t know what to say, just stood there, shrugging simpleton, awkward as some fuck.
Eventually—later later later—lunch would be chatter about Kubrick films and listening to this fucker lie about having seen a battery commercial that had vibrators in it—same pervert fucker who’d end up getting a teacher fired, same fucker was also a member of this same teacher’s Kenpo Karate Dojo (called the teacher ‘Sensei’) this the teacher who one time brought in some boring as cock video of his students doing some routine of kicks and punches and staff twirls for a small audience of nowhere fuckwits at the local fairground (this all to the strains of Eric Burden and The Animals doing ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’) same fucker who’d go on about how he had to be careful when watching his parent’s porn, had to rewind it to the exact instant it’d been stopped at or else he’d be found out (I suppose his parents just watched that much porn, had that exact a memory, kept tabs on the matter).
It soon getting out somehow that I was the person could supply pornography—soft to mid-core, sometimes hard—a rumor I decided not to deny, as I managed to supply the demand rather well, having found some of my older brother’s videos that would dub alright without much picture-quality loss if I connected two piece of shit VCRs together.

I ended up sleep deprived, wandering loops around some warehouse I was working night security in— night security yet again, thing that’d become my perpetual fallback, thing I wrapped myself up in, a bullshit excuse for being nothing.  I no longer even bothered trying to stay awake for entire shifts—the warehouse stored samples used in cancer research, locker-freezers budded the floor, oblong cubes, misshapen, inside them actual body parts, feet and hands and portions of legs, all manner of things in the deep freeze (a fact I had verified when my drunken-yokel supervisor had shown up with some other dipshit rednecks to get the fucking marijuana he kept hid in one of the units, a complete twat).
I wandered long up and down the metal steps, into the bathroom I found too creepy to jerk off in even if I locked the door, knew I was locked in and had brought some pornography in particular to jerk off to.
I wandered and at the top of my voice practiced singing the new song, named after one of the old paperbacks, all those fuckers with pages greening, rusting, bluing on the shelves in the basement of my dad’s house—the novel was ‘No One Knew They Were There’ though the song was called ‘Nobody Knew They Were There’.
Loved the work I’d done, the words, always loved coming up with words to my brother’s music. It’d been a long while and I knew it was a waste of time, that I wasn’t actually wanted in the band for shit any more and it was a totally different band, by now, on top of it—four, five times over by now, different people, different names, so much recording equipment and fucking shit, still never enough.
Thing was, I wanted to be able to hit higher notes, tired of my loser goddamned voice always cowering low—which was ninety-nine percent the reason I wasn’t welcome in the fuckwit band any longer, because of my perpetual tendency to write songs meant to be sung high up, like by some 1950’s doo-wap fucker and yet sung them like farting backward a belch up from the gut of my throat.
I was fond of the lyrics to this one, especially the bit went

And I’ve heard what Mother Nature can do
and I’ve read a book or two on love making
in my day

An excellent lyric, especially with the music, the crest and mawing of it. And the lyric

Nobody knew that they were there
and they’ve taken everything we’ve done away
for themselves

was alright coming out of the slower little segue gap.
It’d come to my eventually realizing, admitting to myself that I’d no desire to get on a stage to sing. It was obvious enough, I thought, to every and all sundry cocksuckers that it didn’t matter, people didn’t give a shit—people-at-large, I meant, people like ‘People’ people, like people-who-were-not-in-bands-of-their-own, were not colleagues, were not just other fuckers wanted to wind up at Denny’s and all of it, talking about ‘their band’ and ‘your band’, how you should ‘all do a show together’ and ‘These are our posters’ and ‘We’re doing an EP before an LP’ or such shit. To me it was nothing to do with anything I’d once wanted.

First track we ever sat down to record—my older brother and I in the basement, I’d never even really sung a bleat of shit before in my life—was dreamy, total pretend; that time in the basement, those three hours, without doubt, rank among the happiest I can remember.
First track was for the album, the song ‘The Little Man Who Wasn’t There’—the phrase from a nursery rhyme, but I’d learned it from Margo Lane saying it to Lamont Cranston in an old episode of The Shadow.
To the song, the title means nothing. This is the general state of the majority—if not fucking all—of the titles and the lyrics we did—the phrase itself is just blurted out in a yarl before a guttural toilet flush scream I did after the center section.
What I actively recall are the opening lines:

License plate
reads ARE zero fifty-one
your blind shoulders are like cocky film noir
all bandaged to my knees

and then I’m fuzzy on a few of the words, but it gets to:

Unwrap my bottle
let the bow fall to the dirt
unblink my lips
drink in the rum frosted glass
rub my palms together and concentrate
on

but I don’t know what the fuck the fellow is meant to concentrate on—something, like he’s looking down at a city, closed down for the night.
It gets to the line

Make a toast to the

though I forget what it is he makes a toast to, but then he says that while he makes this toast he:

smiles
at the child
smiling back at me

and there are some thup thup drum beats and a fucking cool scratching sound from the mute of the guitar strings before the second verse begins.
Meaningless. For the most part, utter drivel. Yet it’s interesting to note that the license plate number was a real license plate number I’d seen only once—with the tune of the song in my head I’d tried it out and it just worked. It was my rule that if some phrase or another—however goblin and referenced ex nihilo—fit the tune, I just kept it, with a sense of relief as it usually led to an upswing in energy that’d tend to get through to the end of the verse one fucking way or another—like all of the shit I’m blanking on (the fellow on the hill, what he’s looking at, because he’s looking at something).
That other shit, all of the ‘cocky film noir’ and how it’s ‘bandaged to my knees’ I know was a mix of some doodled phrases in the margins of my French textbook, my Geometry textbook, something.
I was rather fond of the phrase work ‘Smile at the child / smiling back at me’  though it’s some hogwash I guess was supposed to evoke s ridiculously bullshit sentimentality on the part of the (apparently) drunkard hero of the song. A real point of interest is that I warbled the pronunciation of the singing to milk the approximate rhyme of Smile and Child, was fucking chuffed by my doing so, envisioning magazine interviewers who’d bring that point up, imagining some lonely fucker, some loser listening to the cassette, noting it, wondering ‘I wonder if that was on purpose’ in a bemused, respectably awed frame of mind—I imagined approximate rhymes were chic-sophisticate shit, that people motherfucking got off on them.
I did the singing for the recording sitting in one of the old dining room chairs my brother’d requisitioned long ago to the basement, he sat in another, then switched to sitting on a stool. For some reason, there were index cards that he had on the ground, tapped his foot on.
We did the guitar and vocal track at once, instead of dubbing the one over the other—even if only one fucked up and the other went off without a hitch, we’d start again, they both went together.
On the recording, my voice was this make-believe, scratchy low, because I couldn’t hit the rise before the scream if I started too high. For this song in particular, the bizarro fucking voice fit, if it also showed the more or less bullshit of the thing, the phoniness to the narrative voice—it made it more than fucking apparent the song was being sung by a fifteen-year-old kid attempting (poorly) to come off as a world weary, burnt out fuck of a bastard who’d just seen so much, given up, come to reside in a stew of self effacing nausea and melancholy.
The cassette recording, especially with the blat of the synthetic drums, sounded perfect to me. I was bowled over by the simple fact that the song we’d recorded actually sounded like a real song—like a song that actually existed, like songs I listened to by complete strangers.
This was how music was meant to be—it was all quite the fuck obvious to me—raw and scratching, every glitch and pop perfect exactly where the glitch and pop fell. It had grit to it and pretend at the same time, was so unclean, the same as the dirt in the clothes we were wearing while recording it—it was a bunch of handclaps in my chest, like the first time you ever give a lover a fucking last embrace.
I studied hard my brother’s face to see if he actually liked it—in the sense that it was Done and could be played among the people he knew (I knew totally fuck nobody).  Also, I wanted to dub a copy, just to have, because I loved the song and there is scarcely a thing as beautiful as a cassette in a cassette-box, maybe with some slip-shod homemade cover and a lyric sheet, the lyrics done up tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack by a typewriter to make them violent and etched absolutely real—the same fucking words that were sung, because as we did takes I’d change this or that word, pointlessly remove a plural, change adjectives on a whim (or change a name or some whatever, whatever shit like that).
We didn’t take the cassette in the car, because it wouldn’t play correctly until copied onto another tape. We went to see The Edge having seen a preview, thinking it’d probably be shit—I’d no idea who David Mamet was at the time. The film was fucking brilliant—I fell in love with Alec Baldwin for the scene where they couldn’t catch up to the rescue helicopter.
We stopped at a gas station for snacks and soda. I was terrified of ever having to sing the song again, even though I felt I could sing it much better now—now that I’d done it, it was easy, a prat fall, but I wanted to do another song.
It was just as good when we listened to it a few more times. My older brother said he’d make me a copy. Already I could see myself spending hours at night next to my bed, naked and playing the cassette, whisper-singing like I was going fuck mad in front of an audience in some parking lot or shitty room in some person’s house. That night I went for a walk, babbled like a cocksucker, but couldn’t work up the nerve to sing even a bit aloud though I wanted to screech every line until they were etched in the bricks of the walls and the plumes of cold breath became so sharp they’d never vanish—I wanted music to do to walls what it did to me.

For the most part, I no longer cared how I dressed. I’d wear my security pants everywhere because I kind of liked the stripes on them.
Though they were welcome to, my brother and whoever else was in his band never used any of my old lyrics, now that the sound and all of it’d been gutted.
The only time I’d looked, I’d not been able to find a single copy of my old, hand-printed lyric sheets in the motherfucking mess the basement had become. When I went through some of the hundreds of cassettes down there, none of those fuckers were of me, were just instrumental, the occasional tap tap tap and whispered count off of two three or two three four or one two three or one two three four one two three four. Usually a recording would just abruptly end, there’d be a little clattering, a shush like a hand pressed over a microphone, then the hacking chop chop cough of the Record button or whatever being undepressed by Stop being thunked down.
Now and again, I’d ask my older brother if—not even to perform, just for some fucking kicks, for a stupid time of it—could he record some simple three chord rock-and-roll stuff for me to sing some words to, make a cassette for my own enjoyment and the question’d be met with dim enthusiasm mixed with obvious vagueness, yawns and shit, amounting to a general sense of ‘It isn’t going to happen’.
If not night security, it was night audit at a hotel, a motel, or else back to retail, which more or less meant back to grifting from the register. No matter what, I was floating rent checks the start of every month—not even for lack of money, just for my being a lazy spill of dog piss. It was easier to perpetually beg money off my elderly father who had to work two jobs himself. I knew that he had no way of being able to afford kicking me a whole rent payment or car insurance payment just because I laid a bullshit story on him (a job didn’t pay me right but I’d hit him back with the next check because it would have the back pay on it). He’d give me the money without fail—if I needed two hundred I’d just ask for three-sixty, but hem-haw that two hundred or two twenty-five would do it, while hang-dog, scuffing toe to the ground, muttering ‘Sorry sorry I’ll pay you back’.
Breakfast conversations sometimes still revolved around music, my girlfriend and I even discussed with my brother her singing again, though she was sure he’d never liked her singing. I still thought the band name should go back to Bury Your Dead, Arizona but it’d moved well beyond that (Anderson Council through a half dozen other things, finally winding up Bellflur). Pointless, dreamless music chatter—or else I’d talk about wanting to write a book sort of like George Plimpton’s Shadowbox only about amateur porn entrepreneurs, primarily about the cunt who did Cum On Dagny, because this was the latest site I’d subscribed to.
Everything was dead, curling at the ends like old leaves freezing, puddles drying and the crumpled wrappers and bits of paper in them drying, too. I didn’t think about shit like suicide so much, but I also didn’t so much think about anything

We’d all get kicks out of making funny recordings with a palm-sized tape recorder I’d bought. As my brother’s friend Berlin was my hero at the time, I’d mostly just imitate him, as no one the fuck knew who he was. When I managed to get some actual friends, I even fessed up to the imitation, played some of Berlin’s tapes, showed some of the videos of he and I going around fucking with people—this all before his crash, mentally breaking down after he moved away (and though still ghastly funny in doses, afterward, never the same man, got be a bit of a burden, in some ways).
For some reason, one of the people on the basketball team really liked me and this gave me a dubious credibility in the more hip circles, so that I was able to get myself involved in this or that shit, get laughs out of everyone by being a cocksucker in English class, things of that nature. I nicknamed the basketball player ‘Vanilla Dunk’ after the Jonathan Lethem short story and he (for some Christ fucking reason or another) got his mom to track down the song ‘MacArthur’s Park’ for him after I’d mentioned it—he’d all day long tell me how he loved the song, but he’d call it ‘Funny’ so I’d ask if he was maybe thinking of the Weird Al Yankovic parody about ‘Jurassic Park’, but he’d always insist he meant ‘MacArthur’s Park’.
I’d get in moods where I wanted to talk to no one, where everyone reeked of dog turd— moods where I could cackle, my skin seize like it was going to sprout wings lined with broken bones. I’d get bitter, distant, wait for any goddamned opportunity—the tiniest opportunity—to have a jab at somebody, to trap someone in a pointless little fuckwit debate, make them squirm, feel a right cunt, like they didn’t know which motherfucking way was up.
I gave everyone a nickname—usually nicknames I’d heard my older brother give his friends: ‘The Fuzzy Muslim’ (only for comedic effect I’d pronounce Muslim Moss Lom), ‘Fighter Ryu Hyabusima’ from Pro Wrestling on Nintendo, ‘West Propaganda’ and things like that.  I called some fucker ‘Rusty’, though I’d sometimes start calling ‘Rusty’ something else, because he’d correct me by saying ‘No no I thought I was Rusty’ and I’d say ‘You aren’t Rusty anymore, Froggy’. I liked to call people ‘Chaucer’, to say ‘That’s what you think, Chaucer’ and ‘I think that’s just your own opinion of the matter, Chaucer’ or ‘Why don’t you go fuck the bathtub faucet there, Chaucer’. I’d sometimes think for hours about how easily I could make an ass of anyone.
I liked to try to coax people into hitting me in the face, promising to pay them, promising them anything. The only fucker ever had the balls on him to do it was that plump little faggot I called ‘Naughty Nigel’—he popped me right then and there, sitting on the bleachers while I was teaching people card games and how to shoot craps, cheating whenever I could. The punch was solid, pushed my lip hard into the jag of one of my teeth, blood flowed nicely and Nigel had a divot in his knuckle.
There were days when I’d not even bother going from one class to another, just sat and read some book off the library shelf, read the local newspaper-on-a-stick, sat at the piano bench and stared, then eventually I would sit out on the steps like some loitering motherfuck.

Principle thing of it was, I had strange ideas about exactly what the thing would be in ‘starting a band’, at the time having no notion of the difference between being a band that just made recordings for cassettes—which to me was fuck-all-end-of-the-world beautiful—and being a band that went and stood in front of some fuckers, mostly hipsters or other people in their other bands. For me it was get all to fuck with what they were thinking, with what visions or chit-chats diddled in their heads, comparisons and critiques and all of the nonsense drag of that.
I was still in that fucked state of affairs where I’d concluded on my own things like Led Zepplin were some vaudevillesque fucking garbage—no bastard agreed with me about that—and at the same time was in the throes of still really loving the Robert Palmer songs my mom’d always put on the mix tapes she made for running—Robert Palmer with his vicious fuck beats and his vocabulary; Huey Lewis and the News, all of it. I was still waffling on what I thought of Pink Floyd, finding them such a yawning drag that I didn’t know what the fuck to do, though the film of The Wall was nice—though the film of the stage-show was some over-the-top pretentious shit. I really loved Jethro Tull—
‘Locomotive Breath’ and ‘Skating Away’, sort of ‘Aqualung’, though that one smacked of some hoity-toity asshole qualities. I was rapidly becoming disillusioned about The Doors, especially once I’d gotten my hands on some of Jim Morrison’s poetry.
My wont was to do recordings on the four-track, make cassettes and dub some copies, just drive around listening to the stuff. At the time, Dylan was something I adored but couldn’t articulate. It was heaven to be with my girlfriend, because she’d so violently, unselfconsciously said ‘I think Dylan has a beautiful voice’, so earnestly I felt like a turd for falling into the hem-haw trap of going ‘I like him even though his voice isn’t exactly the best’, which wasn’t even my opinion, I’d just clipped that from my Science and World Religions teacher—who’d not even been talking to me, but to some much more hip kids, they had all going on about Hendrix and Marley, who were about some week old spunk in my eyes. I adored until fatigue The Kinks—who are and always will be far far superior to The Beatles and fuck any dipshit who can’t just listen and accept the obvious truth of that. But I loved The Beatles, loved The Replacements and was in an odd place because The Talking Heads were great, but a lot of losers I couldn’t stand—a lot of phony-as-balls-faux-rebellious-cocksuckers—had patches and cassettes of The Talking Heads and would sing them all out of context. And I loved every track on the Lion King soundtrack and didn’t know what was considered the proper opinion to have of Tom Petty, because he was either a louse and a fuckwit or I liked him a lot, but was too paranoid to even talk about him.
I knew for an aesthetic fact that scratchy was better than clear. All I knew was music was a slipshod column of words that should be plunked and stroked, made clean or discord, wrecked; that words were the same as humming—and no cunt the fuck agreed with me about that, no one was with me. A long stretch in a song, guitar solo the fuck or otherwise, was a waste.  Words. Everything should be words and a dripping closed fist around the clag of mud they were.

——————————————————————————

Pablo D’Stair is the author of the novel Kaspar Traulahine, approximate (free copies available on request at www.ktapproximate.blogspot.com) and the collection of two novella The Unburied Man and The People Who Use Room Five.

Yes, they are LOUD.
In big fuck-off capital letters.

If you have ever had the opportunity to ever see them live you will know what I mean.
The pure atom-shaking physicality of their music in a live situation is something that can only be understood by visceral experience.
Like sex.
There are rumours that sometimes their music can hit the “brown noise”.
You figure it out.
Then there are the black cowls and smoke.
You can do nothing but stand there and feel.

Their collaborations have been equally impressive, with Japanese experimental gurus Boris; Attila Csihar, the Black Metal growler  and even the Arch-Druide himself, Julian Cope speaking Odinist poetry over their layers of sonic waves.

Their last album Monoliths & Dimensions is quite possibly their best work yet.
It features a Tibetan horn, conch shell, string and brass sections and a Viennese church choir.
The last tune, Alice, a dedication to Alice Coltrane is nothing short of immense tenderness.

I am listening to it as I write this.

I remember hearing them at a friend’s house for the first time.
It wasn’t the right time.
But a week or so later, I was on the Paris Metro.
I was very hung over on a Monday morning with the carriage stinking of French piss.
They were on my i-pod.
They made perfect sense.

by Jason Michel

Mr Patton of Faith No More, Fantomas and Tomahawk fame.
He did what it says on the tin.

He grunted, screamed, moaned, bellowed, whizzed, popped, banged, muttered, growled, shouted, whispered, scatted, gurned, crouched and I think only one incomprehensible sentence escaped his lips all night. but he played an instrument alright. He was it. His voice was it. He played himself (take that as you will). Starting with his table of sound ( à la fantomas) and ending just with his mic. He was brilliant, pure demented brilliance.
They were all brilliant.

by Jason Michel