Hey Droogs,

‘Scuse me for the late arrival of this Drudion, but I’ve been held up in all areas and figured that the portal from June to July could be a pretty plastic opening if I so chose. 

Congratulations to the Greeks on reaching the final of Euro 2004 and adding a poetry to the summer – if the Olympic hosts versus the Portuguese hosts ain’t a righteous (and wholly unexpected) final then what else could be? I gots to say that although I believe England to have been robbed of a dramatic victory by poor and partisan refereeing, we weren’t much cop without Wayne Rooney (okay okay, Dorian, Sol and Ashley were up to it). Beckham has shown again and again that combining heroism and celebrity is best left to mythological figures such as the Duke of Wellington, and the lingering appearances of so many ‘yesterday’s men’ in car adverts after the quarter finals only re-enforced the idea that they make TOO MUCH MONEY!

Well kiddies, the Roger album has finally landed (see Album of the Month) and a delightful thing it is, too. Now it’s my job to make sure their sequel is even greater! There is truly great music around at the moment and most of it’s on my turntable. The mighty Sunn0))) has scored another monster with WHITE 2, which starts with one foot on the Earth and then goes into some kind of Lotus Eaters territory (not the shit ‘80s band from Liverpool). The final track ‘Nihil’s Maw’ is 25 minutes of amazing intoning from everyone’s favourite Magyar electroid shaman Attila Csihar. Anyone who loves De-twat high energy rock’n’roll but can’t stand the reactionary lyrics that usually accompany such stuff should grab a hold of The Washdown’s excellent refusenik YES TO EVERYTHING, which harnesses MC5 energy to early Clash, At the Drive-In and The Ruts to make pertinent comments about the Right Now! I’ve also been vibrating off the in-bred sounds of SCREWED by The New Lou Reeds, who come from Cleveland and don’t sound like that old Velvets tosser. Indeed, they’ze coming on more like an over-caffeinne’d Warren Zevon meets that classic Elevators period when even a quizzical Roger Kynard Erikson can’t quite reach the Gurdjieffian complexities of Tommy Hall’s lyrics. Delightful babies, truly unctuous self-obsession at its highest level (‘Without warning a wizard walks by!’). ‘Teenage Metalhead’ has a polio strut to die for (nay, live for) and they even finish the record with a song called ‘Peter Laughner’! Continuing the Cleveland plugs, look out on the Merchandiser in the next coupla days for a bunch of limited Downside Special albums from Terminal Lovers’ Dave Cintron. It’s a classy guitar-daubed singular trip which all Terminal Lovers fans should gobble up.

I’m currently working on an extended re-mix of N.Y.’s White Hills’ ‘They’ve Got Blood Like We’ve Got Blood’ for our Fuck Off & Di label, but it’s so full of possibilities that I’m taking longer than normal (3 hours)… but it’s all the administration I need to do – disposing of cassettes from the past 25 years suddenly swamped me the other day. When you keep finding C90s of Rocket from the Tombs live in 1975, or Krautrock compilation tapes that warrant a first listen in a decade, then it was a cassette of Roky Erikson singing a swelling and oft-disappearing acoustic version of ‘I Have Always Been Here before’ that I taped from a John Peel session in September 1976, then a Doors cassette of demos that some lady gave me in Los Angeles in 1982, plus demos of The Human Beast, Elias Hulk’s UNCHAINED, some stuff that came out on vinyl sometime over the next few years that I never got around to buying, even original Queen Elizabeth cassettes from 1989 when they were going to be a power trio with the late Pete De Freitas… being old is tough when you’re as moved by shit as I am.

Except, of course, for the news that Glastonbury invited the ruddy opera? Fuck off, says I, when I heard the news. Well at least the posh tossers will get bottled off the stage, thinks I. No such luck, the fucking liberal hippies genuinely enjoyed it and so they would if they’re willing to accept frantic pogoing weeds like the faceless Franz Ferdinand (is four Colin Mouldings in one group some kind of record?).

Hey, it was good to see Colin Powell and Saddam Hussein on TV the other night. One was squirming in front of a bunch of foreigners and the other was pointing his finger and telling it like it was gonna be. The strangest thing is it was the other way around from the American Dream: Powell was the one dancing and singing (no shit) to another’s tune (in accordance with Korean protocols, apparently), and Saddam-in-chains still seemed like a genu-wine threat. If the Democracy=God obsessed Anglo-American Christians Bush and Blair don’t wake up soon and read up on their Middle-East history, they’re gonna be the only ones in the world sadly disappointed that merely believing in the right God was not enough to gain control of it. Allah and Mohammed make a lot more sense in the Middle East than God and Christ ever could. Hell, the eternal struggle for those limited resources was the reason for Mohammed’s rise to power in the first place. Indeed, there’s an acceptance of the ‘power man’ in Islam that the Westerner will always have a problem understanding because we live in such fertile and forthcoming lands. Unfortunately, as religions get older, they get fatter psychically and (having to accommodate more ideas along the line) become more slack. So while the Christian West is off shagging, drinking, drugging and celebrating its 21st birthday, Islam is currently in its ‘difficult’ 13th century, which is why disciplining Islam the way we seem intent on doing is a dangerous game, as anyone with a teenager will know – teenage Islam will NOT be told… Perhaps the only obvious answers lie in the next Roger album.

JULIAN (M’Lud Yatesbury)