BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

Fancy that...rounding off the final paragraph of the incredible 120,000 word BTi INDUSTRIAL EXPOSE' - THE DOCUMENT THAT SUNK AN ENTIRE SUBCULTURE!! - and accidentally hitting DELETE POST right at the end. Oh well! As Tripitaka once said to Monkey - life sucks, get a helmet.

Anyway, don't fret. I might have just buggered up 4 months of painstaking research with one mouse click, but Uncarved blog has the latest dirt (courtesy of Stewart Home) on Tony Wakeford, Sol Invictus' pinguid nazi frontman. Apparently Wakeford has severe trouble purging his bowels without leaving an unholy mess all over the toilet seat - and if you think THAT sounds vile, you've obviously never had a pint with the Young National Front gobshites who drink in the Packhorse in Markyate (incidentally, why doesn't someone just firebomb that dump?) I mean, neo-nazis muckspreading in the privacy of their own lavs is one thing - but the bogs in this pub had dung dribbling down the URINALS, for Christ's sake... The bonehead regulars used to nickname this hellhole 'The Bunker', though I'm inclined to believe the much repeated story that a disabled 5 ft Asian walked in one day, snapped "I'm having a drink, anyone got a problem?" and outstared the startled clientele as he slowly downed a pint at the bar.

Anyway, back to Wakeford. Now, if you're one of the many cherished BTI Goth readers who've bought into all this neo-folk nonsense - WISE UP, MUGS. Pour yourself a snakebite & black and consider how much freedom YOU'D have to laze around listening to Alien Sex Fiend, Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult, Sisters of Mercy, Love & Rockets, Killing Joke and Specimen if a maniac like Wakeford ever seized power! One thing for sure, there'd be no BTi BLOG and nobody reading it either- we'd all be frogmarched, at gunpoint, to the nearest pressing plant, and forced to toil over the manufacture of World Serpent CDs 'til we literally croaked of exhaustion!

My advice to you all is to take your entire Death in June / Current 93 / Sol Invictus collections down to the Music and Video Exchange and swap them for a copy of THE LEATHER NUN's "Slow Death" 12". This record is PROPER Viking Industrial, the sound of AIK Solna's infamous Black Army waving aloft the freshly decapitated skulls of failed folk musicians, bureaucrats and barmy mystics (ie- pretty much everyone in the Third Reich) as they roar forward on their Kawasakis of Ragnarok, kicking the beejayzus out of anyone caught playing with runes or indulging in 'sex magick'! The frenzied bootboy snarl of No more talk of politics / No more master race tricks / No more silly rules, no more law and order! on the Motorhead-meets-assembly-line explosion that's "No Rule" pisses all over Wakeford's soppy, pseudo-apocalyptic twitterings about blackbirds and weeping lovers - and for that reason alone, the Leather Nun remain Sweden's best loved musical export ever! Well apart from disco chanteuse Leila K. Runes are for goons!

Anyway, bollocks to all that, let's talk about culture. I decided to whizz over to the Whitechapel Art Gallery last Friday, as XYLITOL was playing some Plan B Magazine-sponsored evening called 'Secret Landscapes' with a couple of other turns. You can't beat gigs in art galleries - for a start, you don't get indie kids pee-ing all over the toilet seats ((or neo-folkies poo-pooing all over them, arf arf! Right, that's the last from me on Tony Wakeford - as if it's my ruck anyway. Philippe Fichot from Die Form had better watch his back though, the big nonce...)). They also seem to operate as autonomous zones for true freedom of expression. Presumably this is why an Irish student type was wandering around the gallery beforehand, asking everyone if they wanted to hear his poetry. He only seemed to have one poem, which he repeated to several people, including the bar staff - it went like this:

Roses are red
Violets are blue

You're dead

See, you can get away with this twaddle in a gallery, because nobody'll turn round and lamp you one. Whatever. Anyway, XYLITOL came on at around 8.30pm, with the windows of the Freedom Press building opposite, festooned with anarchist and anti-war posters, serving as a backdrop. Jim kicked off with "Marike", throwing some metallic drum pad clatters and WIND CHIMES into the mix, and it sounded skip dandy. "Site" and "Lull" also got warped airings, the former sounding more danceable than ever. Unfortunately, his cover of the Oppressed's "Joe Hawkins", while faster, narkier and bouncier than I've heard it before, was slightly plagued by microphone problems. It later transpired that the bloke at the sound desk had been press-ganged into this job by the loathsome 'Steps to Work' campaign - he later confessed that he'd only manned the desk to avoid having his benefits cut and that he "didn't give a fig" for modern music! Subsequently, Xylitol's sound levels yo-yo'd as the gig progressed.

There were some excellent new songs, best being a darkcore rave meets early DAF slow-boiler which absolutely fucking killed it, and a bizarre electronic piece with a vague reggae beat that sounded like...er...the only description I could really come up with on the spot was "High Life broadcast from a remote Scottish lighthouse to a Japanese Bird Demon's council flat". So yeah, if you can dig what I'm getting at there, well done....the set ended with "Glass", again augmented with extra electronic drum splinters and wind chime-jiggling, an improvement on the original.

A couple of things that are now becoming patently obvious: 1) the sheer diversity of the current Xylitol set puts 99% of all this one-dimensional, lazy 'Ghostbox' garbage to shame. While lesser show-offs wallow in their 60s BBC drama fantasies (Pan's Garden indeed!) Xylitol's music is far too relevant to 2007 and sonically immediate to backslide into futuro-retro wanking (fingers crossed this remains the case); 2) Xylitol are as difficult to pin a label on now as the Vacuum Cleaners were in the 1990s, which is to be applauded and encouraged. In fact, this performance had more in common with the spirit and texture of Grime than did last year's completely over-rated Burial album, and yet, at points, you could swear you were standing transfixed in some illegal disco shebeen, a brick's lob from Checkpoint Charlie, in 1980.


Well, that's what I thought anyway! Were you there to make a better assessment? I'll give you fucking Roses are red...oh, don't mind me, I'm off the fags again, three weeks so far.

After Xylitol came BASS CLEF, who's a bloke who plays Dubstep with an amplified trombone over the top. I'm afraid that I spent most of this set making loud-mouthed remarks to You Are Hear's MAGZ HALL about how rubbish it was, but in retrospect it wasn't bad at all ((I blame the Bass Clef fans who sank to the floor, cross-legged - way too school assembly. For the love of Allah, are your calf muscles that weak you can't stand for 45 minutes?)) ((PS- I plonked my arse onto a comfy sofa and stayed there for the rest of the night)). Bass Clef (the bloke) was steeped in concentration and got the most cheers of the night, I think about 20 people had turned up specifically to catch him. Maybe he's really good on vinyl too.

Oh, that I'd joined that 20 as they beat a steady retreat to the White Hart! (yeah yeah, the pub where me and John Eden met the two posh birds - see, it's all coming full circle) Last on were KNIVES OV RESISTANCE, who absolutely fucking sucked. Without a doubt, one of the most crap bands I've ever seen - and I've seen Elvis Patelvis ((not remotely as 'so bad it's funny' as the name suggests, more like cringeworthy soul death)) and The Pets ((ha! ha! see the career went well, you preening bunch of sneering, arrogant, thoroughly unpleasant indie cuntbubbles! This must be the first time anyone's mentioned you in seven years!)) so we're talking really bad. For starters, one of the guitarists came on stage in a white shirt, unbuttoned to the belly-button, pre-distressed jeans and flip flops - he looked like a South African estate agent on the pull in Covent Garden. Sorry but, as regular readers will testify, I'm with Idi Amin on the flip flop question - the answer to which can only ever be THE FIRING SQUAD.

"Oh, leave him alone," tutted Magz, as I fantasised about jumping all over his feet with a pair of biker boots. The cheek of it! The set was terrible too. It made that Pink Floyd gig in Pompeii seem like 15 minutes of the Ramones at CBGBs. The other guitarist sat cross-legged on the floor ((what the hell was all this slouching about? Fucking flip flops...)) and tickled his guitar strings with a violin bow. The third member of the band tinkled some bells around. I found myself drowning in lethargy...my eyelids drooping ...hypnotised by this dross and the seven bottles of Bulmers I'd just knocked back...

I entered The Octoploid public house in New Cross, and ordered a pint of Guinness for me and a babycham for Tripitaka. The androgynous boy priest had been making himself ill with Buddhist speculation recently, and I reckoned a touch of Scandi Disco would sort him out. Leila K was on stage, doing a raucous version of "Ca Plane Pour Moi". Tripitaka was trying in vain to rationalise the Swedish diva's performance and reduce it to some smart-arse quote about the futility of existence, but I swear I saw a smile crack the little sod's chops.

Suddenly - GEORGE, the Hofmeister bear, burst through the front door, accompanied by three of his gurning, bonehead mates. "Oi! oi!" he yelled, as they barged through the crowd, scattering Friday night revellers."Follow the bear!" screamed one of his entourage, as they pounded their way to the bar - sweeping Tripitaka to the floor!

"You fucking show-offs!" I yelled, lunging at George and knocking the furry cunt's hat off, trying to retrieve my holy pal from the beer-sodden boards. Leila K threw down her mic in disgust as it all kicked off. I booted George in the crotch as he warned me he was going to "fuck my sister". The landlord leapt into the fray and started indiscriminately cracking punters over the head with a bottle of Archers. The left side of my face suddenly imploded in a white hot bolt of agony, as one of the Hofmeister gang whacked me in the mush with a pool cue. However, said thug also accidentally swung it into a girl's eye, and ended up getting his head stoved in by her squaddie boyfriend. Suddenly, George pulled a gun from his ski jacket, aimed it at my bonce and

Lord have mercy - Knives of Resistance were STILL droning on. That flip flopped trotter jabbing at an Electro Harmonix effects pedal! Enough was enough - it was time to flee the gallery before I lost the plot altogether. I haven't got any funny taxi driver stories as I actually made the train home this time.

Well, that was worth the wait, eh? Eh?

Oh, go and sit on the floor. Sorry to have kept you up.