Poem: Consoling Myself After Your Affair

Consoling Myself After Your Affair

After James Tate.

My television is mocking me:

staring me into a strange proposition - the beguiling seducer -

compelling me to stare back and be sucked into its pixels.

No, [presses button] I have remote infrared power

sending out infrared beams to distant civilisations.

(It has no idea it is doing this,

it thinks that it is just sending out ‘On’ ‘Off’ ‘117’

but it is actually calling out to occupants of interplanetary craft

‘Come to Earth, invade, it’ll be fine

if you do it on a Saturday, around X-Factor time’).

I don’t need a custom kitchen or MTV or CSI or

to text flirt with real girls in my local area.

I miss you sitting next to me so badly

like ‘And Smith must score’ but even more painful,

and with that I taste the sweet fresh air,

running away from the home that you left.

Bands I Love: #2 Art Brut

Art Brut are a ramshackle bunch of chancers who met in dives and bus-stops and Deptford pubs and at school and formed a band (at which point in any Art Brut article it is vital for the writer to insert the lyric ‘THEY FORMED A BAND’ in brackets to show you’re down with the kids. But I’m not, so I won’t).

They have recently been locked in recording studio by Frank Black/Black Francis/That Fella from The Pixies for a fortnight, and have just come out clutching the master-tapes for an album that is dirty and happy and melancholy and fighty and funny and reflective. And rocks.

It’s called BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! and as a title, it’s fairly accurate. It is also a landmark in indie-rock circles – it features vocalist Eddie Argos’ singing debut. After three albums of talk-singing (his natural singing voice – it’s not irony), he sings all pretty and reverbed and sensitively. It’s kinda cute.

What do you mean you have no idea who Eddie Argos is? He’s like seven-foot tall, but not in a stringy, bandy-legged Joey Ramone way, but in a man-giant way. He’s a comic-book geek, and yet a Jägermeister and red wine fuelled rock’n’roll party animal.

‘Girls don’t like him, Boys wanna fight him’ he claimed on the song These Animal Menswe@r, but a: have you seen his rather beautiful girlfriend, b: only that guy from Bloc Party wanted to fight him, and c: seriously, his girlfriend is very lovely. Christ, this guy had a proper spiv moustache and pork-pie hat phase, yet still is clearly cool.

He’s the lead singer in about a million side-projects and spin-off bands including Everybody Was In The French Resistance... Now!, Art Goblins, Spoiler Alert!, and Glam Chops, despite his previous lack of actually singing. He does it on charisma, and stage presence, and generally having lyrics that are witty, punning, realist, funny, heartbreaking, familiar and tragic. And often brilliant. He’s equally foppish and foolish, lithe and lumbering, rock star and humble indie-kid.

Eddie Argos is not his real name. His real name is Edwin Argos. He prefers the more informal ‘Eddie’. The rest of the band have suitable made-up names, too:

* There’s Freddy Feedback on bass (a girl called Freddy!), the German bassplayer, who sings along microphone-less all show long.

* Ian Catskilkin (a made-up name and he chooses ‘Ian’! Hilarious!) is the guitarist, a man who has been hit with a widdle stick, and yet knows when to rein in his rocking for some nice little melodies.

*Jasper Future (real name Jeff Fulcherington-Smyth) holds the rhythm guitar, upon which he often plays the right chords, inbetween doing backing vocals and precision pointing, in the air and at the crowd. He also does a really good ‘wait for it’ in the quiet bits of songs.

*Mikey Breyer (real name Mike Breyer – the ‘y’ is far more rock) is a stand-up drummer. Not in a comedic way, but in a standing up to play drums way. Also German.

From a post-modernist point of view, Eddie’s self-referential lyrics are not a vain or desperate attempt at meta, but are clever and genuinely warming. As he ages through the albums we leave the teenage boy still in love with Emily Kane; to a young man to idealistic to settle down – ‘People in love lie around and get fat/ I don’t want us to end up like that’; to a singer on a rock’n’roll cliché mission ‘Parents/ Please/ Lock up your daughters’; and finally get to meet the grown-up-ish Argos who now lives in Berlin with his partner ‘People in love lie around and get fat/ I think I’m OK with that’.

Did I do the ‘formed a band’ (they formed a band) bit yet? Oh. Well, the thing is, every time I hear them I’m glad they did. An energetic and explosive live band who love nothing more than to talk about mixtapes with the kids in the audience after the show; a band who combine humour and sincerity like only the very best writers; an enjoyable stomping guitar noise, jangly and angular, melodic and rocking.

If Art Brut didn’t exist, only Eddie Argos could invent them. And I love him for it.

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www.artbrut.org.uk

http://the-eddie-argos-resource.blogspot.com/

Art Brut's BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! can be bought in all good record shops. Including this one. And iTunes and whatever the kids use for their Mp3pod things.

The Comic Book to accompany this LP, featuring work by Bryan Lee 'Scott Pilgrim' O'Malley, Akira the Don, and Jamie 'Phonogram and Suburban Glamour' McKelvie, amongst others, can be bought from here.

99 Words: Uncrossed

I look up, into the sky. But no learned finger joins celestial dot-to-dots. I look through (what I think is) Orion’s arms. There are hundreds, thousands:

all visible to the naked eye on a clear night.

We used to live in London: clarity is novelty. But here, just me: adrift, lost, since our paths and our stars uncrossed. Staring at the moon –

the etymological root of lunatic is moon-sick

– a vague, solemn emptiness stares back; uncaring, forever reflecting. And the stars tonight are dead light; energy burnt, spent years before. But now, still: I’ll love you, miss you, despairingly.

NEWS! Step Into My Office, Baby.

“We need to talk.”

The first line of this blog post is the first line in each short story in the Summer 2011 edition of The First Line, a literary journal based in the USA.

I’ve read several copies of said journal. It’s a very good journal.

The first issue of any magazine that I submitted a piece for was The First Line, Vol 12. Issue 2, in which the first line was Paul and Miriam Kaufman met the old-fashioned way.

The first journal that rejected a piece of my writing was The First Line, when I submitted a piece with the first line was Paul and Miriam Kaufman met the old-fashioned way.

Having recently re-read it, I can’t blame them. But that was last year.

In the meantime I’ve spent another year at University studying Literature and Creative Writing.

In the meantime, The First Line has had several editions published, all with different first lines.

And then, while trying to write something, anything, as I had a really big Uni assignment due in and I had the old writers block malarkey, I started writing, as a distraction, a story with the first line “We need to talk.”

And now, the Summer 2011 Edition of The First Line, Vol. 13, Issue 2, has a story in it titled ‘Already’ with the first line “We need to talk.” And it’s by me.

If you’d like to read by short story ‘Already’ please pop over to The First Line shop, where you can purchase a PDF for US$2 or order one in the excitingly revolutionary new ‘Paper’ format for US$4. Bargain.

You can also pick up copies at all of these amazing bookshops (in the USA).

Anyway, while it’s fantastic to be ‘in print’ and ‘published’ and ‘a writer’, it’s all a bit surreal and the first step on a long journey and a great impetus and all that.

And I’m a massive Belle & Sebastian fan, and I had this wonderful song in my head the entire time that I tried to write ‘Already’.