KTH RDGWY

I’ve had these packages from Jamie Stewart for months. Three of them were still in their envelopes. I’ve been scared to open them. A new one arrived yesterday. So today I opened all of them. Or, I took them out of their envelopes. I took some photos. In some of the photos I include a donkey that Kenneth gave me last week. He brought it back from Cyprus. I still haven’t opened any of the actual packages. They’re quite pretty as they are, and Jamie, or whoever puts them together, is good at knots.

That concludes this blog post.

Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas Day. I didn’t hear until just this week. Just the other day. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t understand it. It seems such a stupid thing, on my part, to have missed that piece of news, given all the useless, pointless, frivolous pieces of news I did not miss. I am angry that he died. Angry that I didn’t know. The anger serves as flimsy cover for the fact that that I am peculiarly moved by his death. By its circumstances, by his age, by the feeling it leaves me of something close to grief.

Which is, objectively, silly. I didn’t know him. Never met him. Saw him play live just once. I don’t have anything at all to say about him other than that his music was and remains important to me, and that he struck me as a better man than I could ever hope to be. He created. He expressed and manifested a relationship to the world and to being alive that was straightforward art, and which was beautiful and profound, and he nudged me with a truthfulness that will touch me, I’m pretty sure, for the rest of my life.

This song, that he performs in the video below, has been my favourite song for months, since it first appeared on At The Cut . It is almost unbearably poignant now. I love its honesty, its precise pain, and its insistence on not being ready. Maybe readiness comes suddenly. And when we’re ready, we go.

I slipped in a small pool of blood on the vinyl floor of the chipper and ended on my arse, no salt, no vinegar please, and the woman in the leather jacket was laughing at the first table, red ketchup, that’s what that is, it really isn’t - it’s blood, I can smell the wound, I tell you I can smell the slice in the skin and you should not treat me like a stranger .

Rope top blood ties, let’s put something on that, this is the safe word, that is not, say it if you want and if you do I’ll kill you, and that is not the way out, that is the exit, and neither of these things is negotiable, you have to go through one or the other, and my sister will collect me if I call her, and I will be mysteriously saved .

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore.
You may not see me tomorrow.

On the hill in the middle distance, on the hill that has the edge, and the cut that has it, THE CUT THAT HAS IT, on the chimney, where I took your photograph before you nearly died, here’s one for ya , I can see the cut, and the air is solid everywhere but here, and you must realise the danger . Those cliffs are high and the rocks down there will kill you. But the falling. Oh the falling.

I’m really delighted to tell you that a new story called Do Make Say Think Show has just been published in Zoetrope: All-Story , the "Francis Ford Coppola presents…" art and literature magazine based in San Francisco.The other contributors in this issue are A.L. Kennedy, Han Ong, Sam Shepard and John Krasinski, who writes about his screen adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men . There is also a reprint of that story. The whole issue comes in a great design by artist Rex Ray.

My piece is fairly long, and is told in the first person, and came about after I went to see Do Make Say Think the last time they played here in London. It was a great gig. But also … strange, for me. And that strangeness prompted the story. It also came at a time when I was trying to write about music very directly - about how music feels, and what it does to your psychology. My psychology. This story is really the only piece that I was satisfied with. I just had another read of it now, in the magazine. I like it. I usually hate my stuff as soon as I can’t change it any more. This, for the moment, I still like. It’s full of clumsiness and terrible sentences and stupidity. But I like it.

Anyway. Do Make Say Think are, plainly, inspirational. And it’s nice timing that their first gig in London since the one described in the story happens next month at The Scala, on Thursday October 22nd. There are still tickets available here . I cannot recommend them highly enough. Look out for the twitching, socially incompetent Irishman hovering around at the back of the crowd. Whatever you do, don’t say hello.

This is a true story, but I’m not really sure how accurate it is. It was a long time ago. I was, I think, about 16. Maybe 15. Me and a friend wanted to get a band together, mostly because we shared the same sort of taste in music. But we couldn’t really play anything and we hadn’t a clue what we were doing.

At some point we either placed an ad in Hot Press, or answered an ad in Hot Press. Because that was how bands got formed. And as a result we made contact with some guy who was about our age, maybe a bit older, who also wanted to do something and who was into the same sort of stuff as us, and who said he played guitar.

I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much about meeting him. We travelled to some suburb of Dublin that my friend and I were unfamiliar with, and we met this guy called Kev, and we chatted about music and wandered around. I don’t know why we wandered around, but I remember us wandering around. Housing estates and roads and shops. It was sunny. Then we were in his house, and he had a few guitars, and we played around with them, and it was obvious that he could play and that we couldn’t, and that he had a fairly good idea of what he wanted to do and we didn’t. Though he did like the fact that I played a four string acoustic guitar with an extremely eccentric tuning and with balls of blue tack stuck to the strings.

He was a very nice guy. He could have embarrassed us because frankly we were clueless. But he didn’t. He listened, and he played stuff for us, and we all shook hands and parted and we never saw him again.

Before we left he told us that he sort of had a band, he thought, or an idea for a band, which was rising out of a band he used to have, or which was a sort of template for a band, and I think he was doing things with maybe a couple of other people, but he was very vague about it. I remember asking him what the name of the band was. My Bloody Valentine , he said.

Kev was Kevin Shields. Not that I knew that at the time. And actually, I didn’t know it for years afterwards. It’s always puzzled me, the whole thing. Mainly because I’ve never been a fan of MBV. And it seems such a shame to waste an encounter like that on someone was isn’t even a fan. And I’ve rarely told the story over the years, because sometimes MBV fans can be a little …. peculiar. I once told a woman who refused to believe me, accused me of fabricating it, and who became aggressive and upset. I didn’t much like that. Also, I have a weird record of bumping into famous people. It’s suspicious.

I’m not entirely sure that he had decided on MBV as a name then. But he certainly mentioned it as an idea for a name. Oh, that’s the name of a film , I said, which is a pun on an old song , and he liked that I knew that, and asked had I seen the film and I had to say no. I think if I had seen it, and if my guitar had had six strings and the tuning had been one that I could explain, then maybe I’d have had a very different sort of life. Maybe not.

All this came to mind today because I was reading this , which strikes me as semi-hilarious, though I can completely understand the annoyance. The second line-up does seem about 93 times more interesting.