BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

Dear Shithawks,

Congratulations! Not only have you arrived pissing and screaming on Planet Earth, wriggling around like peeled slugs in a bag of salt - you've just ramped up the global population to the 7 BILLION mark! Woo-hoo for you! I remember when I was forcibly farted out of the womb, all those years ago, so I do understand what you're going through. Seeing as my mum drank Guinness throughout her pregnancy, I nearly ripped the poor woman apart on my exit, scowling at the midwife, howling for a kebab and literally vomiting with relief at having escaped the dark ambient soundtrack wafting around her uterus.

Thing is, when I landed on this miserable rock, there were only 4.5 billion humans on Earth. I had everything staked out - I was gonna conquer America, penetrate the Bermuda Triange, play speed garage on the Great Wall of China! Even a youthful Howard Jones reckoned he could raise £500 for Help The Aged by shaking everybody in the world's hand and getting to know them better. Everyone could find a seat on the tube. There were 2.5 billion less people and, by dint, 2.5 billion less irritating tossers fouling up the air.

But now, we've got 2.5 billion bandwagon jumpers...joining the planet like they 'belong'...trying to cosy up to us, convince us they've got a 'right' to be here...and you're one of them. Don't think so, fuckface! Read up on some Malthus, you wrinkly, bald idiot, and don't DARE grizzle for a feed 'til you've checked out the figures.

Look, the thing is - this is OUR party. We were here first. We don't need you here. WE ARE THE WORLD. That's WE, not you. Where were you in 1985, when we were all cheering on Status Quo at Wembley, just to keep Mengistu in Courvoisier and SAMs? You're basically a late gatecrasher. Just fuck off to Mars, you stupid, mewling brat.

Love,

Everyone born before 1977.

Over the course of the past 36 hours, me, Chairman Dubversion, Sacha Colgate and John Eden have been having this great Twitter argument about GOFF, and debating whether or not bands like The Birthday Party, Siouxsie, etc counted as real goffs, as opposed to The Mission, The Sisters and The Neph. Eden bailed out of the debate for most of it, to do some ironing - in disgrace - but I thought I'd introduce some audio evidence to back up my side of the argument. Yep...welcome to the early 1980s, the years when REGGAE WENT GOFF!

I can't be arsed to go all the way back to the Ostrogoths / Visigoths ((who were more like Hells Angels with pigtails, anyway)) so let's just say that GOFF arguably started in 1816, during the Romantics' legendary 'lost weekend' in Geneva. Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Claire Clairmont jumped a barge to Switzerland to chug copious amounts of opium with Lord Byron. It was around this time that Byron was so blitzed off his tits on drugs that he could barely tell a squid from a sofa, but this didn't prevent him from billing the almighty bender as a literary shindig.

History informs us that, during this Swiss soiree of SUBSTANCE ABUSE, Byron bet Mary Wollstonecraft ((the 19th century Caitlan Moran)) £5 that she couldn't write a ghost story. In response, Wollstonecraft giggled for a couple of hours, repeatedly squeaking "I'M NOT A GOFF! I'M NOT A GOFF!", and then effortlessly knocked out Frankenstein. A disgruntled Byron spilt his opium tincture all over the sofa when forced to cough up his fiver. However, he should have kept his dosh in his pocket - Frankenstein might be about a mad scientist who brings a corpse back to life via electrical current but, technically, it's NOT a 'ghost story'. Still, try explaining that to a junkie while he's crawling round the carpet, frantically licking cushions. Similarly, it's literature's loss that the Geneva wasters never got round to reading Claire Clairmont's contest entry, about three shamen hired to remove a malevolent and ancient evil from a building, though her effort, Ghostbusters, was plagiarised by Hollywood leaches two centuries on.

Less than 10 years after the Geneva beano, Shelley had thrown a seven, Byron was disabled and knocking around with Greek freedom fighters, and Wollstonecroft was back in London, mourning her consumptive babies. Hans Christian Andersen, a perverted Danish intelligence officer with a fetish for underage goose-costume sex, became a literary superstar with sentimental trash like The Little Mermaid ((though we now know that the Danish government illegally netted and butchered up to 10,000 mermaids in Scandinavian waters between 1825-1840, during a severe cod shortage)). It wasn't until 1845 that some get-rich-quick London hacks, deploying a string of pseudonyms, knocked out a stream of penny dreadfuls detailing the exploits of VARNEY THE VAMPIRE, and GOFF was temporarily resurrected. Andersen hadn't accounted for European yootz preferring to read about bloodsucking undead counts going crazy and biting everyone, instead of crap about spoilt brat princesses sticking peas under pillows. Finding himself out of vogue, Andersen fell into a deep depression, before falling out of bed and drowning in a bucket of goose fat.

Meanwhile, an Irish jackeen called Bram Stoker was dossing around in London, trying to join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Like most occultist groups, the HOOTGD was full of unbelievable snobs, so he had little joy on that front. To make things worse, his mate Pamela Coleman Smith ((aka 'Pixie')) blagged membership, by dint of drawing some crude cartoons for a deck of tarot cards! ((incidentally, she never got credit for her card art 'til years later. Occultist groups, eh?)) So, to stick it to them, Stoker decided to scribble down some proper GOFF classics, the best known obviously being Dracula, which he batted out in 1897. Al Crowley might be idealised by scores of spotty industrial fanboys...but hey, who bagged the Hammer franchise?

GOFF was pretty much everywhere by the beginning of the 20th century. From HP Lovecraft, to people mocking up photos of fairies and smoking clove cigarettes in crypts, if you weren't goff...then man, it's like you just weren't there! Unfortunately, in 1914, World War I broke out and the wholesale massacre of an entire generation led to the subculture falling by the wayside somewhat. It wasn't until 1979, when some bored Melody Maker hack was sent to review a gig by a godawful punk band called Joy Division, that the phrase "BUNCHA GOFFS" entered muso terminology, and the subculture was reborn once more.

If we agree that GOFF's musical heyday was the early 1980s, I offer up these fine audio examples of some of the genre's most influential classics: (yes, you can click on the links, and summon up each song to your desktop -just like magick)




LONE RANGER - Barnabas Collins

Clearly cut from the same body bag as Bauhaus' Bela Lugosi's Dead, this genuinely creepy haunted dancehall anthem focuses on the despicable crimes of a wicked and dreadful vampyr called...er, Barney...particularly his ruthless attack on the unfortunate Sister Joyce ((who was just trying to get to the Birdcage in her 'alter back an' ting. Hey Althea, Donna - NICE of you to just fuck off on the bus like that without waiting, huh?)) Unlike Lugosi, Barney can actually transform himself into a bat though, which gives the entire track a spine-chillingly sinister undertone. I especially love this because when all these popist twats with faces like the BBC's Ben Brown start mithering, 'AH YES, GOTH..ROCKIST! PRACTICALLY SKREWDRIVER IN KOHL...RACISM, PURE AND SIMPLE!', they're fucking oblivious to the fact that Lone Ranger was hanging out in some cemetery in JA, trying to convince himself he liked the taste of blackcurrant in his Red Stripe, and looking better in his goff hat then they'll ever do in their miserable fucking...whatever popists wear.





MASSIVE DREAD - Vamps On The Corner

Clearly taking his cue from the Banshees' more psychedelic album artwork, Massive Dread commissioned an LP cover comprising some chicken-faced mutants fleeing from a vampire that's either a) inexplicably got a shadow b) wet himself...with oil?? Anyway, come one, come all....send Mick Mercer if you like...I'm stating this song is a bona fide GOFF tune, and no word of a lie. The bass and FX on this are as dark as vampire pee, and Pete Murphy would kill to be able to laugh like that. Oh my bad, spot the fake GOFF analyst - Pete Murphy NEVER laughs. He probably does a 'Hmpph' snort every now and then. But boy oh boy, has he made the rest of us cackle at times.



SANCHO - Chase Vampire

If Dubversion is correct ((IF)), then, by 1986, the early progenitors of GOFF had given birth to the more dubious creation GOTH, and the world dissolved into one almighty 12" megamix of This Corrosion. Or maybe Eden's right, and it was all just about the clothes? Anyway, after Prince Jammy and Wayne Smith proved you could use computers to make reggae ((previously dismissed as some far-fetched Tomorrow's World fantasy - I am serious, kids)), it wasn't long before Sancho jumped on the corpse cart and whacked out this novelty Electro-Goth number. Check the similarity between this cover art and the sleeve to Les Vampyrettes' proto-goff 12" Biomutanten! True fact - this track led to a short-lived, bizarre Slimelight dance craze, where punks would line up, 'British Bulldog 123'-style, and jump tall blokes in capes as they tried to charge through the gaps, before chasing any remaining vamps down the stairs into the techno area. But a kid in a Love & Rockets shirt got a Chinese burn one night, so they banned it.

You should have seen Sancho's TDK ad, though. That was PROPER mean.

I love these novelty songs, uploaded with purely wholesome intent on the understanding that nobody seriously contemplates committing an act of violence against representatives of our ruling party!

LIVING LEGENDS - Tory Funerals

((PS- DON'T click the emerald green 'download' link, the real one's lower and to the right))

((Some mods, fannying around with deckchairs, AGAIN. Suppose they'd get four years if they did this now)).

Unless you've seen the event details on Failbook, you'll probably be unaware of this event, so I'm going to give it the oxygen of publicity here:

The Old Lookout Gallery Broadstairs,
Harbour Masters building, Broadstairs Harbour,The Pier (right next to the beach)
Broadstairs, United Kingdom
Opening 2pm Friday 2nd September: Exhibition runs 2nd September - 5th September 2011

Opening Times: Fri - Tues 10 - 4pm.

The Old Lookout is the chapel of a religious pirate radio cult whose radio station Radio Mind, is relayed by its' Missionaries across the golden sands of this popular seaside resort.

Inspired by an obscure group of early 20th century Anglican clerics with a shared interest in telepathy, psychic research and psy...chology as paths of divine/human communication, Radio Mind will take over the Old Lookout gallery, Broadstairs as an outpost from which to re-open the paths of transmission through performance, broadcast and participation.
Radio Artist Magz Hall specialises in creating sound and radio events outside conventional studio settings and this micro transmission investigates the shifting terrains of the transcendent and the quotidian through new communications technologies. Drawing on early 20th Century experimental Protestantism, historical and mythic seafaring cults and the powerful mythology of the radiophonic aether, notions of radio, piracy and the religious imaginary will be brought into question.

This radio installation will broadcast from an 18th century fisherman's hut in Broadstairs harbour, its beams and panels salvaged from scrapped vessels, and will broadcast across the immediate beach area as a micro-FM broadcast to be transmitted by beach-mission cultists baring radio receivers.

So, there you go. I'm not so hot on the Anglicans, but it should be interesting - plus I haven't been to a wind'n'rainswept beach, listening to inhuman electronic sounds, since the time my cousin dragged me to Bundoran for 'Krazy Nite Krazy' at O'Gorman's nightclub. That alone SHOULD have landed us four years in clink...

I feel compelled to issue a statement clarifying my position as Barnet & Brent correspondent for WOOFAH magazine.

When I joined the title in 2007, I did so in good faith, believing that an independent mag for grime, dancehall and dubstep fans was inherently a positive move, and one that would sidestep the usual publishing concerns of boosting circulation and subscribers by rehashing any old shite from a press release.

As the events of the past fortnight have confirmed, this was sadly not the case.

First came the 'interview' with Leslie Lyrics in Issue 1. Had I known that the 'quotes' featured had been obtained by illegally hacking Professor Lyrics' Nokia 3110, I certainly wouldn't have contributed copy to the magazine. Unfortunately, it appears that the editorial team was content to pull the wool over my peepers as well as yours.

During my frequent visits to the WOOFAH office, I often spotted a man in a kaftan and sunglasses, clutching a large hessian sack marked SWAG, darting out of the back window and making his getaway in a badly beaten-up golf buggy, mere seconds before my arrival. Whenever I raised this with the editors, I was assured that everything was 'OK' and that it was most likely 'a neighbour, collecting milk bottles'. I received this answer six or seven times.

In fact, when I openly challenged the editor, to his face - Is the print run being bankrolled by Gadaffi? - he just looked me in the eye and categorically stated, "No".

We now know this to be a brazen lie.

But the lie didn't end there.

In 2010, a WOOFAH co-writer, whose identity will remain anonymous, met me in a pub near Warren Street and handed me a dossier of emails he'd collated over the previous two years. They paint a picture so gruesome I can scarcely bring myself to convey the horrors within.

The dossier included: proof that WOOFAH writers had phoned the Met to get London grime nights cancelled, just so they could submit articles about police heavy-handedness; AIM chat transcripts revealing that shipments of fresh new releases from international artists, forwarded to the magazine for review, had in fact been intercepted in Stoke Newington, redirected to Dublin and listed on eBay; proof that the infamous Droid v Eden 'Kings X clash' was staged - all 'live mixing' having been provided by a fellow WOOFAH hack, hidden under the table((a retrospective photo of the event, when enlarged, reveals that the decks weren't even connected to the amp)).

You, WOOFAH's loyal readers, deserved better.

It is with the utmost regret that I have to report that the person who provided this dossier cannot comment further on the situation. This is because he was found dead in his home, just two hours ago.

In light of the above, I therefore wish to announce that, with immediate effect, I am resigning from the zine and will henceforth cease to have any connection to WOOFAH whatsoever. I thoroughly reject any suggestion that I was aware of the foul play committed by the editorial team during my time on the zine, and must insist that any enquiries regarding the aforementioned crimes are directed to the former and present editors, as well as the dubstep editor, most likely.

Sincerely,

Martin.

Throughout my life, I've been accused of being a technophobe. I guess this stems back to 1985; while all the other kids were playing 'Donkey Kong 2', I was still trying to guide that blob of mercury through the maze. I personally think technophobia's a harsh one to pin on this cat. Maybe it's the technology that's flawed, and not me - ever thought about it like that??

I mean, take email: supposedly the greatest advance in instantaneous global communications since the carrier pigeon...and yet every memorable, genuinely enjoyable email I've received over the course of 12 years has been outweighed, 100 zillion to one, by bullshit like STOP BEING A LOSER WIN TODAY You don’t need designer clothes to play at this casino. Play from the comfort of your home. Ask Chairman Mao - he was so sick of spam, he just shot the fucking pigeons from the sky. If only half of these'firewalls' did the same.

What about mobile phones? Listen, I'm not given to product endorsement, but I'll say it: the Nokia 3310 was the best phone I ever dropped down a flight of stairs and I bitterly wish I still had it. I could fire off a 140+ character text in about 20 seconds ((and I didn't even use text speak)) and I felt every beep and vibration a mile off. Shit, there were child soldiers out in the Congo who heard my incoming text alerts. The only thing I couldn't do with it was take pictures of my cock and text them to my girlfriend, or go on the internet to buy DMX Krew CDs - ooh, bothered. It was a tough, vicious beast of a phone, seemingly impervious to whatever concrete, wooden or steel surfaces I hurled it at, and of absolutely no interest to muggers whatsoever.

So what about now? Well, after leaving my iPhone in Texas 3 months ago, I decided to opt for an HTC Wildfire instead, purely 'cos it was £200 cheaper ((no, my iPhone wasn't insured. Only thick people actually lose their phones)). And hey, guess what? Now, I don't have a fucking clue if anybody's calling me because it takes about a decade to go through 'Settings' to get a proper, honest ringtone ((what's all this whirly ambient shit?)); knocking out a text on the miniature touchpad feels like playing a game of 'Operation', taking me 20 minutes to nail down five words; and the predictive text options make me feel like a ventriloquist puppet for some smug cyborg - hey, just complete my sentences for me why don't you, twatbot. But I can take pictures and 'streaming video!', and a pair of windscreen wipers goes SQUSHHHH across the screen when it's raining locally, so that's OK then!

Had enough yet? What about tube trains? In the old days, it used to be hilarious when a city banker got trapped in the carriage doors, after a last-second sprint down the escalator. You could sit back and watch him sob in terror and agony as the PORTALS OF PUNCTUALITY crushed his worthless bulk, requiring about 6 people to help pull the red-faced spanner into the carriage. Now the doors just lightly poke against folk's shoulders and retract after a few seconds. Where's the fun in that?

Oh please yourselves. It brings out my inner SPG officer, any odds.

I'm no technophobe but, if I resent being held up in queues behind doddery old ladies, then I sure as fuck ain't taking it from a bunch of robots. This simple attitude explains why I treat all new applications and technological developments with extreme caution.

Nonetheless, there are three interzones where I'm delighted to engage with technology, and they're called MEDIAFIRE, MEGAUPLOAD and RAPIDSHARE. Why fork out $200 + shipping for a 5-LP S.P.K retrospective box set, when you can download the lot for free within five minutes, and then delete it all once you've realised the live sound quality's crap and the uploader forgot to include the slightly pricey No More 7" anyway? Squeeze every last penny's worth out of your home broadband fee, that's what I say. Maybe it's the equivalent of eating 'til you mess your pants because of 'the starving Indians', but let's face it, people in China would love the freedom to illegally download out-of-print industrial rarities, and I think it's an insulting waste of bandwidth not to do so on their behalf.

Subsequently, the idea of using the official iTunes store to actually BUY tunes always struck me as semi-retarded. UNTIL...I was cleaning up my flat last week and came across a £25 iTunes voucher. Ah yeah - a 'redundancy present' from last year. Perhaps if my former workplace hadn't made 30 people redundant six months before they kicked me out, I'd have received a decent gift. Anyway, 'waste not, want not',etc, so I decided to scratch off the code and spend the voucher on a few things that seem to have eluded Mediafire etc.

What a fucking fiasco. Hey, Apple, here's an idea - why don't you explain to your users, UP FRONT, that they need to include a) at least one number b) at least one capitalised letter when creating an iTunes password, instead of pissing my time up the wall by listing your requirements AFTER the fact? About 10 minutes later, I was actually ready to 'go shopping', having had to re-log twice after being bombarded with account activation links. Oh and nice 'search' function you got there, boy - funny how all roads lead to Rihanna.

Anyway, my first port of call was BLACK ROOTS' Black Roots With Friends album from 1993 ((£7.99)). I had a tape copy of this reggae release many moons ago, back when it could be found in remainder bins for about 99p. For some reason, the platter's languished in near total obscurity over the years, though I was really keen to hear it again. To be fair, it's not an amazing album - this was more of a nostalgic head trip, as I wanted to listen to Juvenile Delinquent and Tribal War for the first time since I was 17, back when I still didn't have much of a clue about reggae and every vinyl buy was a wild stab at hitting jackpot. Still, it's aged OK. Ish. It's funny hearing the group sing Don't be like the Protestants and Catholics / Who are killing dem one another......wow, we really did host some wicked sectarian wars back in the '80s and'90s, before the Islamic fundamentalists jumped on the bandwagon. Tribal War sounds a bit different to how I 'remember' it; I'm certain there was a bit where the rhythm drops out and gives way to a "WAR-ORRR-ORRR-OAAAHHHH" dub echo, which definitely ain't on this download...but maybe I'm confusing it with that "BOY-OY-OY-OY-OYYYYY" bit in Trinity's Three Piece Suit. It's been a long time after all. Can't tell you who Black Roots' 'friends' were on this album, as iTunes didn't bother to list any credits.

Incidentally, Black Roots With Friends actually comes with two bonus albums tagged on; Blue Moon by Kevin Eastwood and Triad by Adrian Brown / General D / Tippa Ranking ((or 'Tippa Ranks' as lazybones iTunes chooses to refer to him)). Kevin Eastwood's OK for a lovers rock gargler
((yep, as the album title suggests, he does a reggae version of that soppy old croon-tune)) but he didn't really float my boat. The Triad album sounds ace though! Never heard of any of the three UK singers/MCs responsible, but the tunes are great, especially Adrian Brown's Don't Care A Damn and Tippa's Lef Out The Coke. So you can imagine my disgust at checking out the original release details, and discovering there's an extra three tracks that iTunes didn't bother to stick on the download version, including a song by General D called Poll Tax. Hey, thanks a fucking lot - Triad isn't even on Mediafire either. Don't suppose anyone can burn me the missing tunes?

So this is the mighty iTunes?? The main problem is that there's simply nothing on there you can't blag for free elsewhere ((except Black Roots, obviously)). I ended up looking up ancient speed garage tunes that I hadn't heard in ages, but then I got paranoid that some of the labels might have been affiliated with Ministry of Sound, so I jacked it in and downloaded Take The Money And Run by Steve Miller for 79p instead, purely 'cos it was playing in a bar in Houston one night and it made sense in a sort of 'getting wasted in cowboyville' style. Hardly has the same effect in an overcast NW London, but sod it, it wasn't my wonga - and you can never have enough songs about teenage sweethearts going on an armed robbery rampage while being chased around the state by a bent sheriff. It's like Zombie by the Cranberries - to you, it's probably some maudlin dirge about Northern Ireland and all the Protestants and Catholics killing dem one another...but I've just got a Thai pole dancer with skull make-up and a rubber bat tucked into her G-string implanted on my brain, forever, thanks to some glorious Bangkok bar specialising in face-value thematic interpretations of song titles. One girl wore a hard hat and jived around a toolbox for AC/DC's Shake Your Foundations. Guess they could have just panned to some retired stockbroker waking up in his shitty hotel room with all his credit cards missing for Take The Money And Run...


Thank Bejayzus for Xylitol and Hacker Farm. Speaking of which...

I turned 35 at the weekend. I know this fact's less interesting than spotting Nordic deities' faces in the clouds, but it's led to a shedload of HAVING A THINK on my end of the deal. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things...or so wrote St Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, as he wolfed down another hit of crack while 'Shanghai Cindy' zipped up her white cowboy boots, snatched £20 off the dresser and scarpered out the door. I think my problem is that I haven't really put away my childish things, yet. I'd rather have a Mars Bar than unlock the meaning of life. I still get the urge to smash tube windows when I hear the sludgy opening geetar riff on the first Chaos UK EP. About the only childish thing I don't do anymore is cry over the 'Night Night, Jamie' bit at the end of Jamie and the Magic Torch - but then, that ludicrous mindfuck of a cartoon hasn't been on UK TV since the GLC impl0ded.

Incidentally, this blog's been pretty silent on the whole 'Nick Clegg crying over music' scandal - but doesn't it make you want to vomit monkeys? I mean, for fuck's sake. I can understand a grown man getting a lump in his throat 5 minutes into The Pogues' version of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda - you know, it's a pretty harrowing indictment of the inhumanity of war, complete with teenagers having their legs blown off in trenches, stinking mounds of corpses, shells exploding everywhere, crippled war veterans wheeling themselves past silent, gawping crowds - a fake cough and misty eyeballs are wholly appropriate for a song like that. But... crying over some My Cunting Valentine song, because it reminds you of that indie girl who dumped you in the Horn of Plenty before Dub War came onstage??? - get the fuck out of here. Great - our quackistocracy's jointly run by an adult baby who blubs over songs, and a Smiths fan. I'm not a massive Gadaffi supporter ((unless, of course, the Daff's innocent - hey, don't always knock the underdog without the full facts)) but you have to admit - you wouldn't catch him snotting into a kleenex over some friggin' tosh like Spiritualized or Sparklehorse.

Naturally, I utilised Twitter to demand that Clegg spill his guts concerning exactly which songs cause him to cry. If he'd replied with Bright Eyes it still would have made him an epic wussbag, albeit one who gives a shit about the plight of fugitive lab rabbits who've taught themselves English. However, if he'd come back with something by Duffy, we could have safely committed mass suicide in collective disgrace at having been co-subjugated by such a waahhmonger. As it happens, Clegg didn't respond at all, instead tweeting some fake rubbish about visiting a factory, in order to deflect attention from my persistent enquiries. Beyond all doubt, this oaf has wept to Scouting For Girls. Or The Feeling. Whoever released that She's so luggghly! She's so luggghly! dreck.

She's so luggghly! I used to think that straight women bawled to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Rick Astley records because they'd detected, in these performers' soulful vocals, masculine qualities that no 'real' man could ever live up to. These sonic sorcerors fed women a teasing glimpse of a romantic shangri-la that would forever be denied them and, subsequently, the female listeners wept and wailed in frustrated lust, as their real-life spouses roared obscenities at O2 Customer Support in the background.

Now, I'm not so sure. After all, Otis Redding openly admitted to just sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time. Where I come from, that's usually a hangable offence. If he'd been sitting IN 'The Dock Of The Bay', grabbing a pint with Mick Sweeney and watching Channel 4 Racing...wasting time...there'd have been fucking tears alright, and not ones of ecstasy. By the way, if you aspire to the Crust Punk subculture, forget the vintage Deviated Instinct patches - you have to give credit to Otis. He was literally dossing around on a dock all day YEARS before those glue-huffing, atonal Bristolian fleabags Disorder were squealing "Vomiting green haired punx / Standin' on the dole.." and pledging themselves to lives of indolence. If Otis had been on the dole, he'd wouldn't have 'stood', he'd have sat. Actually, he wouldn't have been on the dole, because he wouldn't have even moved from the dock of the bay. The DSS would have had to send snoopers to the bay to ensure he wasn't doing any undeclared fishing ((fat chance)).

Aye, it's a mean trick the soul singers pulled on womankind...I guess straight blokes' equivalent would be Betty Boo putting on a space helmet and gyrating around a gigantic Freudian alien tentacle. Still, dating's not what it used to be. Have you seen these pick-up artists? It's like a swarm of cockroaches in bootcut jeans. All droning around Covent Garden, practising their lines. Apparently, the best way to line up a tumble is to 'neg' women, by offering them a mixture of compliments and insults - Nice earrings...ya fat cunt! and the like. I dunno, it's not like in my day. We used to drink a flagon of cider and work up the bottle to tell goff girls that we dug graves for the council and that our parents didn't understand us. Show off an unusual birth defect, like a third nipple or a tail, and you were in - provided she found the idea of pillow talk about SPK 'being better than The Cure' less troublesome than traipsing back to Houghton Regis at 3am on her own. Well, that was the theory. Anyway, I think what I'm trying to say is that Buddha wasn't lying when he rattled off that wisecrack about how the further you go, the less you know. Quite frankly, my advice to younger BTi readers, having reached this major milestone in my life, is...Uh?