Dear Supernauts

Well, ‘tis done at last! Cornucopea came to the South Bank Centre and we free-kicked ass from All Fools to Great Mothering Sunday. With 20/20 Hindsight I enjoyed the hell out of it – though the run-up shook me to the corps of my booties and the final hours of countdown had me clucking somewhat. Still, that’s as it should be if I’m the forward-thinking Mofo I claim to be, and re-locating to London for a festival such as Cornucopea was always going to be something of a conurban compromise. Nowadays, Dorian only ventures out of Wiltshire at lambing season or when the name of the month ends in a ‘J’, so we had to use stealth and attitude to get the whole family into London.

I hope you all had a righteous weekend under the watchful Eye of Odin’s Great Millennium Wheel – the Colouring Competition and the Doctors of Madness Disco kept some people happy all night long, though our intended fake Japanese quiz show ‘Double Your Arsehole’ had to be scrapped at the last minute when our hostess was taken ill. My weekend ran smoothly, except for a brief blip 37-minutes into the Queen Elizabeth show, when my iMac started playing my Clavioline samples an octave too high. Apart from that, everything was a stone gasser – especially Klaus Schulze’s decision to judge the Krautrock Colouring Competition himself! Brain Donor set new standards for people walking out of Cope gigs (to get their last bus/tube home, he smiled deludedly), but they’ll all love it next year, just like always.

I’ll say a big thanks to South Bank supremo David Sefton for giving me so much rope, thanks to MC Sean Hughes for being funny as fuck, and a special grin for Paul Simpson for playing the wonderful Festival Hall organ during ‘Sleeping Gas’ on Sunday night. We hadn’t played together since the very early days of The Teardrop Explodes 21 years ago – I still had to put tape on the keyboard so he knew which notes to play! Rock!

And finally, thank you to everyone for being so open-minded about my choice of artists. I know you couldn’t have dug each and everyone, but you were compassionate and kind – a rare thing in this Judgemental era.

I’ll clear off, now.

Love on ya,

JULIAN