A Belly New Year to everyone out There!

It’s Twelfth Night already and my mother-in-law Leli B. has had to compost all the figgy pudding to stop me comfort eating. Dunno about you, but it seems to me like 2001 was just a bit too legendary and Kubrickian for any of us. So I’m glad that we, at last, find ourselves in the un-legendary and un-thought-about 2002. After the past coupla years of Millennium turbulence, I could really handle a few years with sod-all significance. Now, I’m watching the sun coming up and listening to Speed, Glue & Shinki’s immense and sprawling double LP. Sounds great on the cans! Sheesh, Joey Smith’s insane drumming, caterwaul singing and truly Klaus Schulzean Moog playing makes this the strangest combination. From MC5 to T. Dream in one massive album. Too damn patchy for an Album of the Month, though. Dammit!

Of course, even as I write, Nuclear India and Nuclear Pakistan are both standing on the verge of getting’ it on, whilst bush fires across the south-east of Australia are threatening to engulf Sydney, evacuating 5000 residents in the process. Along the Cornish and Devon coast, villagers have also been evacuated from the threat of an oil tanker called Willy waiting to explode on the rocks. But all this don’t worry me none – I know we’ve got Stony Glare dashing from world crisis to world crisis, pouring oil on wounds, and salt on troubled waters, or whatever it is he loves to be seen doing. “Death to Posers!” as we say in Brain Donor — he’ll always be our Shite in Miming Armour.
In India yesterday, Blair sobbed that the terrorist attack on their parliament was just as wounding to him as one on our Houses of Parliament would be. Then you’re fucked, Blair, you Internationalist Knobshiner. And so are we. While Bush looks more and more everyday like Saviour of American Asses, our world goon trolls around from battlefront to world storefront polishing up Britain’s dubious New World Role possibilities in order to put forward his own Messianic Ass as great Christian mediator. What with his Hoddle-like combination of the Bible and new age healing, Blair and his dorkette missus are two scary motherfuckers, if you ask me.
And just in case anyone you know is beginning to fall for this descent/retreat towards debating an understanding of the Silly Soddism which is patriarchal Islamo-Judaeo-Christian Monotheism (something I’ve noticed being entertained even amongst the supposedly intellectual broadsheets), have a look at this American Indian overview of Western Religion as seen by the war chieftain of Chief White Cloud. This is what he told Londoners in 1845: 

“… My friends, you have told us that the son of the Great Spirit was on Earth, and that he was killed by white men, and that the Great Spirit sent him here to get killed. Now WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND ALL THIS [my capitals]. This may be necessary for white people, but the Red Men, we think, have not yet got to be so wicked as to require that. If it was necessary that the Son of the Great Spirit should be killed for white people, it may be necessary for them to believe all this. My friends, you speak of the good book that you have in your hand … and if we learn to read it, it will make good people of us. I would now ask why it don’t make good people of all the pale faces around us. They can all read the good book, and they can understand all that the black coats say, and still we find that they are not so honest and so good a people as ours. This we are sure of. In our country the white people have two faces, and their tongues branch in different ways. We know that this displeases the Great Spirit and we do not wish to teach it to our children.”

Right On!
Right On!
Right Fucking On!

Sometimes we need to step right outside our own culture in order to see what transparent lies are being foisted upon us.

And speaking of ‘outside our own culture’, right Now, I’m sitting indoors listening to the shamanic roar of Kan Mikami, as he narrates his way through Shyuji Teryama’s epic Jasumon. If the music in early ‘70s western rock operas had ever approached the intensity and mystery of J.A. Caesar, I’m convinced that the artform never would have died out. Amon Duul 1 playing “I Walk On Gilded Splinters” is a magnificent combination. Yoko should have persuaded the Tokyo Kid Brothers dance troupe to do ‘Sometime in New York City’ in exactly the same ‘big ensemble’ style. Mikami is just as prolific nowadays as he ever was, Yoko, so it ain’t too late to ask him! Whoa, it’s a mind-bending thought!

As last year was so decimated by Foot & Mouth, this year a‑coming is gonna be a big load of travelling and fieldwork for me. So it was monumental news to discover that my voice is back in shape. Weeks of therapy and making weird noises means that I can now re-schedule all those shows that got battered towards the end of 2001. So Copenhagen, Cork and Dublin look as though they’ll go ahead, as will the re-scheduled Aberdeen show. Thighpaulsandra and I may even be taking our Queen Elizabeth show out to play with Coil in Zurich. Yeah, I know – but I’ve been writing a big shamanic freakout piece about Spina de Mul, so it only seems appropriate that we should try and perform it in his neighbourhood first, doncha think?
All of which brings me to the re-release of QE2. Head Heritage has been so bombarded with requests for us to put it back on catalogue that I’ve finally relented. I always told JoAnne that we should employ a Don’t Look Back policy, but as the album is now nearly 5 years old and still being very much demanded, I did figure we could justify a re-release. Also, Brain Donor’s new single will be released in early March, and it’s a between albums blitz called “Get Back On It” – only 2.26 in length but accelerates like a fucking rocket. 

From what information I’ve gathered from my project director at the British Museum, June seems to be the most likely time for my return bout. We’ve talked to a few archaeologists about one particularly interesting idea, but I’ll be coy and tell y’all the news later in the winter. Towards the end of the year, I’ll be releasing Rite Now on to an unsuspecting world, but that, too, is bare bones information to be firmed up much later. Anyway, I’ll get out of your hair now and let you all work at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions. Remember more than ever that our mantra must remain: “Education! Education! Education!”

U‑Know!

JULIAN (M’Lud Yatesbury)