Norns, Maenads, Camp Followers,

This Drudion is dedicated to you all who made this recent tour such a wild and abandoned experience for myself and the gentlemen of the ensemble. Messrs. Doggen, McGrail and the Skinner Brothers would all like to raise a glass to ye who kept us inspired by texts, howls, letters and notes of appreciation of the dementia, blood-letting and wanton moronic toss that curdled the air at each show. Every night, we celebrated our show’s end with a toast to Sir Lord Baltimore, the MC5 and Lynyrd Skynyrd; and a plea that we – unlike Skynyrd’s magnificently poetic but ultimately Thor worshipping singer Ronnie Van Zandt – would all remain Odinistic and forever welcoming of change, rather than becoming like his famous Freebird character: ‘this bird [whom] you’ll never change.’ Great to see Merrick, The Seth Man, Vybik John and Amazon at so many shows, and special thanks to Glenn Max at The Royal Festival Hall, for allowing me both to open and close the show, thereby showcasing Santa Cruz’s finest – Comets on Fire – by sandwiching them in between. 

Now that CITIZEN CAIN’D is finally released, I’ve begun working on the ultimately clichéd heavy death’n’resurrection rock’n’roll LP of all time entitled DARK ORGASM. Demos for ‘I Can Awaken the Dead’, ‘An Unfamiliar Hole’ and the interminable redemption hymn ‘How German is your Helmet?’ suggest that this will be the best (worst) album thus far recorded. In the meantime, look out for fabulous underground releases from New York’s White Hills, whose Fuck Off & Di debut is soon released entitled THEY’VE GOT BLOOD LIKE WE’VE GOT BLOOD. Also, the 14-track Head Heritage sampler DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST, TOMORROW HAS BEEN CANCELLED is finally available from the merchandiser, complete with my catchy bastard title track, which sounds somewhat like The Monks [un]doing Limmie & the Family Cooking. Forthcoming in the next couple of months will be the second album from L.A.M.F., this being a study of prehistoric shamanic near-death experiences in Hell or thereabouts; a deep inner space trauma featuring a massive explorative spoken text entitled ‘Hanging on Dodon’s Tree’; plus hellish Zarathustrian bagpiping and epic grind collaborations with Sunn0)))’s Stephen O’Malley and Spaceship’s Mark Williamson. 

Those in need of deeply resonant meditational doper stimulation right now this minute should get their bleary butts over to omvibratory​.com, where Al Cineros and Chris Hakius of the legendary Sleep have finally returned from the underworld with their new project, the immaculately named Om. VARIATIONS ON A THEME is a three track-album with the opening 21 minutes ‘On The Mountain at Dawn’ dominating this exceptional debut, its ‘Jerusalem’-like vocal intonations sending the listener into a theta meditation unsuitable for the operating of machinery.

Finally, I shall be doing a tour of Italy next week to support the publication of the Italian translation of REPOSSESSED and HEAD-ON in a handy-sized 730-page edition. Weird how English is such a punk language you can say all you wanna and fuck off quick, whilst most other European lingos take such a fucking age to say the same thing that it prints out at least a third bigger. English is, therefore, thee most ecological language in the West! It certainly don’t make English any better technically, but if brevity of communication saves a few more trees, then I’m D O W N !!!

Okay, ‘mouter here. Ta muchly again for the quality longhairs and bountiful ladeez in the front rows at the shows. 

God Save the Whale,

JULIAN (M’Lud Yatesbury)