Friday 27 November 2009

Let's Do Some Living After We Die: A Near Death Experiece (NDE)

Tonight, in the mood for a fag, I take up my Swan Slimline Filters and break one off from the end in my mouth (I feel like an enormous parasite assailing a tiny host and sucking the shit outta his hole when I do this) when the filter torpedoed to the back of my mouth and bounced daintily in a spiral manner down my throat. I imagine it looked like Luke Skywalker’s proton torpedo going down the exhaust chute on the Death Star, so flukey was it.

I have always had a love hate relationship with filters. It is true, I’m peeved when I come to not having any, but not totally devastated – and once I made a lesbian laugh when I showed her one and told her it was a midget’s tampon.

But tonight – when over the head of a filter my life nearly came to an end – I have decided to stop using filters.

I suppose I should now say how I didn’t end up choking to death on offending filter and turning the colour of a pale Smurf from asphyxiation. I leapt from the chair and stumbled round my living room, knocking over and breaking sundries till I upended myself over the coffee table (all poncey, me) and landed smack down on the floor under the TV. On the TV was Susan Boyle doing her cover of the Stones Wild Horses. She got to an appropriate bit “let’s do some livin’ after we die...” which inspired me to begin thumping myself very hard in the back and chest, like a maverick self harmer, till I’d coughed (now green) filter up.

I know how Bush felt now when he nearly choked to death on that Pretzel (and by the way: if you want to read about how Bush single headedly murdered 17 people, all on the same night, then click here. There’s apparently proof of it, and he had to answer questions about it when he was running to be Texas Governor).

So no more filters for me. I might check out if midgets are issued smaller tampons though and take it from there.

Wednesday 25 November 2009

X-mas Earth Mother

I fucking hate Christmas. To me it appeals to only two sorts: the simple minded and people of a mean and nasty disposition. For the simple minded it is all the colourful lights and binary renderings of ‘Old Christmas Classics’ delivered through the genre of Musak that sets the synapses in their candy floss brains reeling. They temporarily regress to an infantile mindset and they grin and glow like an over the hill (5 yrs old) orphan when introduced to his new parents (who are probably part of a satanic cult who will slow roast him and serve up his marinated (in goat's blood) corpse to their coven), when met with the glistening of tinsel or the aroma of chestnuts roasting...

For the mean and nasty sort Christmas presents to them ample opportunity for verbal and psychological combat. With all the get togethers of friends/family, and all the alcohol drank, freeing up the constraints of good manners and protocol, this sort will engage in malicious and spiteful snipping on all fronts. Or they will sit in stony silence for the duration, like a constipated walrus, psychically transmitting to all about them that they are not to be approached. I am a little bit like this. I choose not to engage in any form of festive feeling. I sit like a deaf mute – in a semi meditative state, willing myself into oblivion – impervious to the enforced smiling and grating false cheer & insincere egalitarianism. I have often claimed to be a Jew or a Jehovah’s witness when Christmas comes around so as to avoid Christmas parties.

Today in Sainsbury’s (where I haven’t been in a while) I was nuked by Christmas visuals and awful pan pipe Christmas hits. At the top of the mall there is this fenced off Santa display. It is shit – standing around Santa are what have to be the ugliest elves I have ever laid eyes on. The look like haemophilic Cabbage Patch Kids. Santa I really didn’t notice much, so mesmerising was the ugliness of these elves. Around the elves feet, in very poorly arranged snow, is lots of money. Mainly silver and pounds. I imagine this is for some charity, but having not noticed any signs or anything, I am at a loss to say which. But whichever it is, this display with Santa and his ‘Make a Wish Foundation’ elves is an insult. I was so tempted to steal some of that money today to buy myself a bottle of beer. Next time I will bring a magnet and attach it to my shoe. I have narrow feet so I will slide one foot between the railings and suck up the money. But is money magnetic?

Also noticed in Sainsbury’s: Speciality Cheese. How is it speciality? What can it do other than be cheese? scour your saucepans too?

As well: Having fished enough change out of my back pocket to buy my bottle of beer I stand in the queue watching the customer in front of me who is at the till. She has one of those flakey ‘I’m Not A Plastic Bag’ canvas bag jobs. She takes out a bottle of wine and says ‘I have 3 of these’ then gets another bottle out ‘and two of these.’ She was asking the girl on the till to have a little too much trust in her I think. What did she think, this customer? That because she was a card carrying Earth Mother hippy flake the girl should believe she didn't have more wine in her poncey bag? Had the roles been reversed and the Earth Mother was on the till and the millie doing this, would Earth Mother have so quickly trusted her? Maybe she were trading on the Season Of Cheer’s ethos of Goodwill To All (Wo)Men? She can get fucked!

Is it cliched to be cynical at Christmas?

Tuesday 24 November 2009

I *heart* Jo Wheeler

Today I met Bogdan for a smoke of weed in the park. He was telling me about how last Saturday night he met this fat girl in the Slimeshite (Limelight) who he took back to his smelly pad to buck. I asked him how fat was fat –
“She was fat as fuck,” he told me. Fat As Fuck. I’m not exaggerating. If I told you she was 27 stone I wouldn’t be far off. She'd an arse like a peninsula.”
“That’s a new one,” I offered.
“Yes. She was enormous. Surface area of about 5 and a half foot. And wouldn’t you know? I went down on her. Her insides were very spacious, I went down to her fanny, and took a look, and it was like staring through a window into a big mansion.”
“My goodness!”
“I started to worry that I should’ve brought distress flares. After finishin’ on her flares are the only way they’d find me again.”

It was my turn to talk about sex then, and I told Bogdan how I was getting fed up of Kimba and all her funny notions about witchcraft and dark side people and light workers. I told about how it takes nearly all night to fuck her with all her weird tantric rituals and warm ups etc. when all I wanted to do was bust a nut. Plus it meant I missed all my programmes like Coronation Street and Lesser Spotted Ulster with sad sack Joe Mehan.

Secretly, because I kept it to myself and didn’t even mention it to Bogdan, my emotional passionlust toward a certain Sky News weather girl has been reignited somehow. Her name is Jo Wheeler. She ticks all my boxes. She is older, around 45 (my cut off point – like the last day you could eat a bit of fruit), and has the sexiest smokiest eyes to ever kindle within a human skull. She is to eyes what Julie London is to vocal chords. Monochrome erotically evaporating perspiration, my girl. And I mean monochrome like a verb........(ignore little gimp if ad comes up)

I am thinking of writing to her again. I’d tell her I agonisingly yearn to sink my face into her slightly wrinkled cleavage. I’d describe how I’d like to spurt reams of cum in between her freckled brown tits and how I’d like to watch my spermatozoa run along that slightly wrinkled cleavage like many milky rivulets – the milk squeezed from the golden udder of a Hindu cow deity that floats around in the sky.

Then again, on second thoughts, when I wrote a letter to her a couple of years ago, when I was annoyed she’d got a new hairdo (reprinted below)

“Dear Jo,

I would like to ask you: ‘what were you thinking?’ when you asked Stacey/Chanelle the hairdresser to sculpt such an abortion of a haircut upon your skull. I am very angry. Till your beautiful natural auburn hair grows back I would like you to wear a wig. If you do not I will kill your family! Only joking ;). Love ya doll!

Your Playboy Lover,

Danny Pongo xx”
the Sky News computer security goons sent me a very terse email back insisting I ‘desist from my correspondence with Jo Wheeler’ or ‘the proper authorities would be notified.’

Bogdan tells me not to give it up with Kimba. He says, “Once you throw it away, away can’t throw it back...” I don’t like Bogdan’s glib philosophy. It too accessible.

Here is the gorgeous Julie London:

Tuesday 17 November 2009

The Great Coronation Street Massacre

Today I was laid up with the cold and watched hours of TV, one of my favourite things to do. There’s an ace Handsome Family song, called Drunk By Noon. One of the lyrics goes:

Sometimes I can’t wait to come down with cancer/ at least then I’d get to watch TV all day/ and on my deathbed I’ll get all the answers/ even if all my questions are taken away//


During the channel 5 movie, which today starred Brian Dennehy, and which was very boring, I listened to this song on my Hi-Fi. For me the novelty of being laid up wears off quickly. Due to some internal working of mine I am unable to fall asleep and snooze through a flu/cold. Today I made do with trying to make shapes and objects out of the nicotine stains on my ceiling. Much like cloud spotting that, only like a sort of hell for sinful cloud spotters, where they can do nothing other than stare at the same clouds for all eternity.

My favourite movie to watch when sick is Hannah And Her Sisters, which coincidentally is the same film that Robb Flynn, lead singer of hard-ass Californian band MachineHead, likes to watch when he’s sick, too. Barbara Hershey can still do it for me even when I’m sweating half my body weight out with a temperature over 100degrees. I’ve a feeling Robb Flynn feels the same way.

Which brings me on to today’s Porn-a-Like, which took up a great deal of the afternoon/early evening to find - up until Coronation Street came on.

Today’s Porn-a-Like is Andrea Catherwood, newscaster from Northern Ireland. I like to imagine Andrea has lost the will to live, reporting all those war casualties from Iraqistan, and so, to inject some zest back into her automaton existence, she takes on the roll of a call girl every Saturday night. Way to go, Andrea!

Tonight’s Coronation Street Double Bill was fantastic. Firstly, Tony’s madness has come to the boil and he has perfected that shiftless psycho stare that would make you feel like you were pissing into the lightening were it to fall on you. When he breaks into autistic Roy’s cafe looking to kill him he moves like the terminator when he’s in that nightclub trying to find Sarah Connor. You could hear every stainless steel joint creek.
Gary Windass is thinking of joining the army. His mother’s and other Coronation Street residents reaction to this I found surprising, in that they ridiculed him and warned against it. I would have felt that the producers would’ve had an obligation to their sponsors, Harvey’s, to have characters actively support the war/recruitment to the army. Because after all, it is Harvey’s who have won the contract to refurnish all the Iraqi’s new houses the coalition are building for them after they’re done carpet bombing all their old ones. Build them all shiny new democratic abodes, with all the mod-cons, and, this is where Harvey’s comes in, all in need of some nice plush sofas and those ornaments that come alive during the ad breaks, which in a duel capacity will keep those mad mullahs in line.

But whatever. Yet I have this suggestion for the scriptwriters: Gary Windass goes off to war, comes back battle scarred and a bit mental and promptly garrottes his good-for-nothing dad Eddie, then knifes his mewing ma, Anna, to death, stabbing her 874 times, a UK record for numbers of stab wounds in a knife murder (this fact is quipped upon my Norris a fortnight later, when the shock of the incident has subsided, the quickness due to soaps’ sped up laws of time which is 6 times faster than in this dimension). He then goes out onto the street and does a Hungerford. He bursts into the Rovers with a 12-guage and blasts a massive hole in the alabaster bake of 64-going-on-21 year old Liz McDonald. Steve McDonald, her son, does some of his giddy man-child astonishment + bemusement shtick and throws his hands high in the air and flexes his fingers about like a brain damaged toddler when he sees this, and Windass blows his fingers off. Betty gets it through a hotpot she’s carrying out from the back, which causes the fragments of the plate to fly into Ken Barlow’s eyes, blinding him (3 years later he gets so fed up because he can’t read his boring classics he kills himself). Windass then kills Audrey Roberts, David Platt, Mad Joe The Kitchen Fitter, and E.T bake herself, Gail Platt.

Tight mouthed adulterer Kevin Webster gets it next as he works in his car repair shop. After Kevin is shot to death Windass continues to fire more rounds into the garage causing a fuel tank to explode, which somehow blows up the Underworld knicker making factory killing all inside. Windass’ gun spree then abruptly comes to an end when Jack’s pigeons swoop on him a la The Birds and cocoon him in a pile of toxic pigeon shit, which is henceforth kept there as a remembrance off and to the great Coronation Street Massacre.

Just a suggestion, Coronation Street writers, if you’re reading. You could wipe out half the cast this way in a character referb’?

Saturday 14 November 2009

The Jeremy Kyle Show: A Beautiful Thing

I was on the phone to Aloysius earlier telling him what was on Jeremy Kyle this afternoon. Today’s show was called 'Kyle’s Inspirational Kids’. The funniest one was this 7yr old boy born with his heart up his arse. Kyle is nearly as saccharine and insincere as he is just plain mad-as-a-bottle-of-chips. He did his sitting on the steps thing as well. In the usual ‘I’m your da and your ma’s your sister’ shows he only does this when he wants to carefully extract the contestants’ (and I mean contestant in the strictest sense of the word) incest stained, alcoholic story by empathizing-ing, before laying into them with his own special brand of tongue lashing. I'd hate to be his under achieving son. I am certain this is some sort of hypnotic technique he uses; maybe NLP (Neuro-Linquistic Programming).

But on today’s show he sat on the step the entire time. I don’t know why he did this. I’m sure none of the parade of unfortunates (including a manc Rocky Dennis 12 year old) needed to be put under the influence of Kyle’s mezmirizo parlour trick. Between the contestants pieces Kyle give a little trailer to the next one up. This had him somewhere in the middle of some Yorkshire town (or wherever he films it) sitting on a fountain in a German Army Jacket. He looked like a right down and out brain spastic. Maybe he is now. I’m not up early enough to see if he has any new shows on in the mornings. Maybe he’s been reduced to filming the links for his compilation shows in a grimy Leeds-esque town on his uncles old Panasonic camcorder. Now I remember, I’m sure I saw Graham in the background busking with a tambourine.

Jeremy Kyle strikes me as a sort of carnie for the 21st century. His show’s like the old 19th century carnivals, where folk used to go and watch men bareknuckle boxing or to stare and spit at the baby with the golden face freakshow. Now Kyle has brought the 21st century equivalent into our living rooms. Through the television. Only now we don’t see men fighting or midget freaks (most of the time), now we’ve got men shouting at their girlfriends telling them “the baby couldn’t be mine cos I only ever did you up the shitter.” It’s a beautiful thing.

The other week a woman was on telling her story of how her husband got her to eat the ashes of his dead first wife before killing her kids. I wondered had he got her to eat them too? That would be a family size meal that, wouldn’t it? These shows are not Jeremy’s typical fare either. Instead of having 2 or more guests on shouting the odds, on these specials he does, a single guest comes on and tells their awful (usually: rape, murder, child abuse, necrophilia, beastiality, a combination of the three) stories while being gently prodded by Kyle to not leave any of the venal details out. These take the form of one-man stage plays – like long monologues. These shows of his are like the Vagina Monologues for the noughties. It’s a beautiful thing.

So I told Aloysius about what he was missing on Kyle, seeing he’s carrying out an experiment by not owning, or watching, TV. Some of the best TV of the latter half of the first decade of the 21st century and he’s missing. For shame. For shame. Then I heard this lush mellow come on, on his turntable in the background, which is what he fills his days with now, listening to old vinyl records. I aksed him what it was and it was this:

Thursday 12 November 2009

I Loved You Before I Could Even Call Your Name

I got off the bus at the Europa and walked through the arcade, stopping at the front steps next to the bronze washer women and rolled a total miscarriage of a smoke due to my unfeeling cold numb fingers. Cold’s crept up quick and quiet like a dark corners rapist.

I smoked the wrinkled banana bent fag and stared at the bronze washer women. I bet you the one who made them calls them ‘wemmin’ on all his pamphlets. One of them put me in mind of Julian Simmons. I imagined him dressing up like one for his nightly Corrie intros.

They’re weird those bronze washer women. They’ve got tennis rackets and rolling pins and all types of kitchen utensils stuck to them. These items seem to be growing out of them – or are somehow part of them anyway. Made me think of the Philadelphia experiment where the US Navy sent this frigate full of seamen forward in time to 1984 then back again to 1943/44, I think it was. When they got back they’d bits of the ship sticking out of them (like guardrails say) and some had become entombed in the walls. Others had their bodies sticking out of the floor – and some – were merged together, half and half like too Siamese Siamese twins.

Which reminds me of a Madeline McCann joke – What do Madeline McCann and a submarine have in common? They’re both at the bottom of the ocean filled with seamen....!!

So I stood musing over these washer women when I noticed this girl walk past, all of 16. She was the spit of Amy Winehouse – and had obviously aped her style to make her look even more so. I’ve always had a thing for Amy Winehouse and that combined with my look-a-like fetish had me nearly tailing this girl home. But I didn’t – when I remembered that if she was only 16 – and she looked that more or less that – then I’d not be able to rattle her anyway, seeing the age of consent here was 17 (as far as I know?)

Then a great memory entered my head when I remembered how Loaded in the 90’s had a page of Porn-a-Likes where they had shots of these porn actors who looked like famous people: Richard Madeley, Lorraine Kelly, Torville and Deane etc etc. So I have decided to host my own weekly Porn—a-Likes here in honour of this Loaded tradition – which was, in all honesty, one of the only good things about it.

At home I started in on the porn then. I sort of knew what to look for – or the general direction to take. Porn is one of my major habits. Or hobbies, whatever you like. It makes for a better hobby anyway than what I filled in on my 3rd year career class questionnaire, which was: Hobbies in ascending order – 1. Home and Away 2. Dreaming 3. Going to the toilet to drop one.

Eventually I found what I was after. It was entitled ‘Amateur takes it from behind from big Jamaican. Sweet.’ In it there was a girl who looked the AW. And the guy looked a little bit like Seal. Plan to turn this into a weekly (or twice weekly) feature, depending what the frequency of my porn viewing is, which at the minute averages out on 3 times a day.


Wednesday 11 November 2009

Monkey The Dog Part3

So...yes...I estimate I was up that tree for 2 hours or so. After a time I was starting to get weak and faint. I didn’t know if I was just going to fall asleep or pass out and die from acute hypothermia. I thought to myself that if it were to be the latter I’d be forever attached to that tree – my arms wrapped round the branch tightly. No one would be able to remove me and at Halloween time the local Portavogian children would come and throw all the unwanted sweets they’d got trick or treating at my wrinkled yet otherwise perfectly preserved frozen corpse.

Below me the dog was still ceaselessly circling. I began to decide to myself that this was having some sort of hypnotic affect on me, like staring into an ever-turning spiral. I started to wonder if it were me clinging to that tree or if I were the tree be clung to. My Buddhaistic surmisings were to be short lived though when I heard a whistling approach from behind me. I thought of Omar from the Wire and played on the notion of him finding himself in backwater Ulster Portavogie to collect on a drug debt.

The whistling man approached and the dog finally stopped circling. The dumb animal was dizzy: woozy and stumbling; and boked up in the long grass around the tree.
“Monkey. Monkey you stupid animal. What are you doing?”
The dog whimpered back.
“That dog should be put down!” I yelled. “Or if not put down constrained by a strong chain 24 hours a day! It chased me up this tree!”
“We do keep him chained up,” said the farmer whose looks were a cross between a Thomas Hardy prototype and the Simian curves of a young Fred West.

“He loosed hamsalf from has chain this marnan” he said out of a slit of a mouth – an old clay pipe firmly stuck in the corner between stiff chapped lips. “He’s an heat. It as impossible ta becalm him – unless I am ta assuage has urgings mahsalf.”
With this he smacked Monkey’s bum and sat him down. “Right Monkey mah boy – time ta arouse ya!” The farmer took Monkey’s limp little maggot dick and started to tickle it into life. In a matter of minutes Monkey’s dick was long hard and purple. And it was very big. It looked like he’d been stabbed in the stomach with the thin end of a snooker cue and had had it driven right up inside him, leaving only the fat end jutting out.

Once the farmer had him going Monkey started to spasm and he promptly came like a fireman’s hose. The length of his jizzim stream at full capacity was as long as 3 30cm school rulers back to back.
“Right young lad,” said the farmer. “You can get down fram thar now. I’ve becalmed him.”

So I did. Get down out of the tree.

Getting back into Belfast on the bus, the street lights curved along the Lagan lit up under the Albert Bridge, this song came on the radio. Balls’shaft ain’t NYC, and not even the combination of these epic production values, or my optimistic imagination, could convince me otherwise.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Monkey The Dog Part2

When I turned onto the Harbour Road I saw in the distance, at about 200yds, a large lean Rottweiler emerge from a big grand house with ornate iron gates. A fear so overwhelming and new hit me like a fry-every-day-for-20yrs heart attack. I have always been afraid of dogs, even the little ones. It’s their barking strikes terror in me. I was in mid step when I saw this affront. I had not even laid my foot on the tarmac, but stopped, frozen stiff like this big black dog were channelling Medusa and turned me to stone. On seeing me it stopped frozen like, too. I started to immediately expel fear pheromones. I imagine that smells something between shit and cancer, the smell of which dogs can famously pick up on. My breathing became shallow, but my heart was beating fast like a high performance engine’s chrome pistons. I hoped I’d die of a fear induced heart attack before the beast got within pouncing distance. He made the first move. He turned had the look of an athlete waiting for the starting gun. The ancient flight or fight instinct introduced itself to my thinking. But...before I could come down decidedly upon one or the other the dog launched into a full throttle gallop, and seeing more often than not I’ll run anyway, even from a gang of girls, run I did. I ran for my life. A satanic low growling came from its unimaginable throat. The rumble grew louder as he gained on me. I ran to the end of the road and came up level with a field that was bordered with a four foot high hedge. I hurdled the hedge and ran at an angle across the field. In the distance there was a tree. The dog entered the field by running straight through the hedge like a bullet through the fog. I had moments to reach the tree. The mud underfoot was slowing me down, but to the dog it proved no problem. With less than a second to spare I reached the tree and without sourcing branches I scrambled up it, sticking my nails in the bark and hauling myself up like an adept Thundercat.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Low fag-smoke grey dome of clouds overhead. Very cold. I must’ve been stuck up that tree 2 hours. Occasionally the Rottweiler would enthusiastically leap up and snap its jaws in an attempt to catch the leg of my jeans.

Tomorrow more...

Monday 9 November 2009

Monkey The Dog

Sitting with Aloysius at the minute. We have made a discovery (through Rueben's intel networks) that voice synthesisers, so loved by Stephen Hawking and other vocally disadvantaged people, are being used by terrible menacing louts to make threatening phone calls to young mothers informing them their precious children have been killed in various horrible and blood curdling fashions - such as being eaten alive by pigs or murdered by splinter group republicans in a razor-blade bomb. The scallywags have been claiming that they are in fact Stephen Hawking, or other stars who rely on the voice synthesisers, such as Elizabeth Taylor. Some of the more clued in mothers have questioned the veracity of the likes of Stephen Hawking personally delivering this news, and as a result are ignoring the phone calls.
The other day I was up in the Deliverance-esque Portavogie. It is my feeling there are more dogs there than people. Dogs have overrun the place. Packs of dogs hang around the only connection local Portavogians have to the outside world, which is the Mace.Here newspapers are sold, which include The Star and The Sport, which the locals purchase hungrily in an attempt to learn more about the world outside the town's atrophied limits. But obtaining such a jaundiced celebrity obsessed view of the world do not do the Portavogian's any favours. Incidences of stabbings and incest are common place, and most Portavogian children between the ages of 7 and 17 believe Jordan is the Prime Minister, and the ghost of Anna Nicole Smith is the US president.

It was walking along the Harbour Road on Friday night I encountered one of Portavogie's more vicious canines - who chased me determinedly up a tree. Its name was Monkey. Monkey the Dog. And it was a Rotweiller. Details to come......

Monday 26 October 2009

Aural Chemotherapy

I’ve been away for a while. Can’t specifically say why, but I can give the following scenarios, so take your pick:

a) Was in the middle of a shootout between rival drug gangs, getting nicked in the ankle by a stray round. Spent the last two weeks in hospital.

b) Sex game gone wrong with Kimba, involving a vice, a snake and a blowtorch. Spent last two weeks in the burns unit.

c) Tripped over a stray slipper left in local chippie. Broke my arm. Oul granny came back to retrieve the slipper. She leant over and laughed in my face when she saw the predicament I was in. Spent last two weeks in the fractures unit.

Ok, I’ll say. It was C. Don’t care though, still gonna tell people it was A or B.

While in hospital I got a visit by Sweeney. Sweeney has a number of hang-ups, which include, but are not limited to, germs in and around hospitals. He has a psychological 500 metre safety zone around ones that he’s approaching. On his way up the Lisburn Road he’ll don a dust mask and keep it on till he’s at least 500 metres clear of the building again when he’s left. He came in like this, with his dust mask on, wearing a pair of latex gloves. He’s generally freakapolooza when it comes to germs. Once I watched him in the reflection of my hall mirror taking a piss in my toilet. He got a bit of piss on the seat and instead of tearing off a couple of squares of bog roll he took the whole thing and dabbed it with that – then! put it back on the windowsill. And to my shame I never said anything, so perturbed was I.


Sweeney has a plan to start a band. The members he’s suggesting (Aloysius, Bogdan, Me and Kimba) cannot even play a tambourine between us. Sweeney says he’s aware of this, but that this band would be all about the ideas and the sound. Sound not music, he said. He asked for name suggestions. Aural Chemotherapy I suggested less than enthusiastically. Then, with more helpfulness, I said to him that if he were interested in a band that just was about ideas and sound we should start a clown troupe instead. He was not impressed.


Sweeney wanted to start a band before when we were in school. He wanted it to be a three piece, me, him and Joe Kelly. He was inspired by Nirvana and thought he were Kurt Cobain reincarnated. I’d to tell him then that this would have been an impossibility, whatever crackpot new age bullshit he were reading up on, as Cobain blew his ice-cream-for-brains all over the place 14 years AFTER he was born. Our band’s name back then was Infanticide. It were my idea that we print up T-shirts with the face of Dunblane massacre’er Thomas Hamilton on the front (on a side note, Dunblane had many weird facts attached to it, such as Hamilton being close to George Robertson (one of Blair’s poodles during the Kosovo war) and the files on Dunblane have been sealed for 500 yrs or something – plus Hamilton was a high up Mason who knew loads of political figures). The (later to be found out as) paedophile Mr Sadie pulled me up on the band T-shirt and give me a good spanking with his slipper. Which led me onto another brief peninsula of memory, which was how one day in his French class I had my headphones in with the pin that goes into the walkman in my mouth. I was bopping away.

“What’re you at, Pongo, you fucking halfwit?”

I took the pin out of my mouth and said “dancing to the voices in my head sir.”

“Don’t try and affect schizoid airs with me, you haven’t the talent for it.” How right he turned out to be.