Hey Darlings,

Five to one, baby!!! Love on ya, Sven Goran Erikson – you buoyed up the people more than you coulda with a ritual sacrifice of the entire board of Railtrack. I’m sitting in the early morning sunshine looking out to distant Silbury, where Skanska Smorgasbord or somesuch is lowering big old funnels of concrete into that volcano in the cranium of the Mother hill. At last! And not too soon either, especially after those fascist crop circle bastards endangered her very existence by climbing down inside her for their brain dead vid shoot. Fuck‑U legendary croppy no-marks – one day soon, and it won’t be long, I’m gonna climb Silbury and sing my song. Until then, I’m a Silbury virgin and still loving from a distance.

Got the Head Heritage Album of the Year cranked on the stereo – yup, it’s the first LP by Sir Lord Baltimore and it’s still never off my turntable! Sixteen months after reviewing it first, this fabulous disc remains closer to my heart than anything I’ve heard these past twelve months. John Garner’s voice, phew! Some assaults are somersaults you can dig, and the Garn has a way of twisting vocal gyrations that mix prime time Iggy with operetta without being horrible Freddie Mercuryisms. So pumped up!

Gotta hilarious email from Merrick, who told me he was in his tent at some festival one morning, when he heard two little boys outside arguing over which one was gonna get to play Odin! Oh yes! Bring it on! When I told Dorian about it over breakfast, Albany admonished me: “Dad, you talk about Odin TOO much! What about Mother Earth?”
“Honey!” I shot back, shocked. “Every day of our lives we drink a toast to the Mother Earth. Every day we salute her and love her and talk about her. But I gotta teach people about Odin, because he is the way for MEN to respect her, too. Odin gets all his power from the Mother and from women. In the myths, he’s always going into ancient mounds to summon up the Goddess for help.” My kids play a game called Frigg and Freyja, in which I play the World Tree of Yggdrasil, so they’re steeped in this stuff – but I gotta tell ya this, the whole next generation is gonna have to recognise the symbiotic male/female thing and damn quick or we’ll all be knee-deep in bigger Patriarchal bullshit than ever. You CANNOT have a return to worship of the female without a place for the deeply physical male – Jim Morrison’s Renaissance man of the Mind idea was bollocks. That’s why I can so dig the football thing – worship of the physically perfect footballer by fat ale-bellied homophobic couch-potatoes with skinny wives is society’s unconscious recognition of the shaman spirit without even having to intellectualise it. Call Beckham a plank or whatever, but whenever that guy wears a mohawk or a sarong, his just not-getting-beat-up-in-the-street-by-gangs is statement enough of how Out-there society still is!

Which brings me to the British Museum performance of DISCOVER ODIN. I’m so sorry so many of you are experiencing such problems in getting tickets. Unfortunately for all of us, the British Museum are still trying to get it together – when they contacted me last November, they said this would be the first event of its kind and I figured it was worth it just to get different attitudes and faces into such an environment. As a colossal repository of all things ancient, I believe in the British Museum, even if the storerooms are the places which house most of the stuff we’d all like to see on display.
The Project Director of DISCOVER ODIN told me that when they had Michael Wood in last year, they forgot to advertise it (!) and only got 250 in a 900-seater hall! So really, if you keep experiencing tickets hassles, it might be worth some of you London-based heads just turning up. Believe me, kiddies, this ain’t no Copean Money-Making Scheme – it’s all part of my bigger picture of EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!
And I know it can work just from the reaction of curators when I played the video of Alice Cooper doing “Black Ju Ju” (all 9‑minutes of it!) on the big screen. All these guys had been half asleep until it came on and then, suddenly, they’re all saying they wanna be on the door for DISCOVER ODIN. Rock! Got video of Amon Duul 2 circa 1971, plus loads of other secret stuff for ya, kiddies. Come on, ain’t seeing that stuff loud on a big cinema screen worthy of a bit of shite to contend with? U‑Know!

And now I must say a huge thanks to Holy McGrail for reinventing The Modern Antiquarian website into a fine-tuned monster Head Turner. I peered into my computer screen and couldnay believe it! What’s this place gonna be like a year or two? It’s got the possibilities of being the greatest repository of ancient information this side of the Historic Records Office. Holy, U‑Know!

Other great news is that Coil’s Eskaton record company is likely to be releasing the new ANAL JOINS THE TANK CORPS album. And belated congratulations must go to the Boy Anal himself, who got promoted last month after his second spell in Bosnia. It’s five years since K.A.K. released Anal’s first album ZERO BEATS PER MINUTE, so I might ask Grr-Jeff Rushton at Eskaton if they need any sleevenotes written.

Finally news regarding the Donor – yup, the album is out there this week. I’ll be in Europe doing promotion and continuing to write the storyline for the forthcoming Donorfilm (no title yet). Mark Locke and I will deliver a very apt and grizzly musical for yer or none at all.

Anyway honeys, with the sacred mound glowing on the far horizon, I’ll quit y’all now.

Love, Peace & Fuck,

Mr. DRUDE (M’Lud Yatesbury)