What Planet Are You From?

this quiz was made by The Autist Formerly Known As Tim

Incidentally, there are 6 inches of snow on the ground and it’s bloody baltic!

The photos from Auntie Samantha’s Farewell to Englandshire Party are now up in the Gallery at the Clubhouse. Be warned, even though I haven’t yet posted the video of MVC fisting the minge, some of the photographs are barely worksafe.

I don’t think it counts as porn when it’s puppets, but I’m sure there are those who would disagree.

You will be sucked dry by a leech. I’d stay away

from swimming holes, and stick to good old

cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when

your toe scrapes the bottom.

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla

Oh my gods! I’m selling my house! There’s so much to do! I’m leaving next week! I need to pack! Aaaaaargh!

We were watching some piece of crap on the telly the other night and the well-known guitar riff that we know and love from the final dénouement in the original Manhunter comes on.

“What was that called? Did we ever find out?” I ask the Frood.

“I’m sure we did but I can’t remember what it was,” he replies with a shrug. He’s still stuck on Where’s My Cow? bless him. I think he’s fascinated by the “Hruuugh!” noise the hippopotamus makes.

Some googling later and I finally turn up the information that the soundtrack was released in limited quantities only and you’ll be bloody lucky to find one. After some more digging I managed to confidently identify the track in question as a piece by Iron Butterfly called In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

Only it’s not available for download from any non-dodgy sites. So off I went to Amazon and ordered a copy of the deluxe edition. I needed to find out where the damn cow was anyway.

The reviews are universally pants. Other than the eponymous title piece (is that a redundancy?) the album is generally considered to be utter shite. I figured it had to be worth a go though.

Oh my lords. You can’t tell from the picture but the cover is that weird double-image plastic – they used to make rulers out of it with dinosaurs on for kids. The butterfly flaps, man. And the colours. My gods, the colours. I haven’t seen anything like this since foilovision.

Sadly most of the album is execrable. Flowers and Beads in particular makes me want to vomit and stick leeches in my ears while pouring tabasco sauce-smeared raw garlic into paper cuts I have made in the fleshy fold at the base of my thumbs.

However, this does not detract from the “Holy freaking shit” feeling produced by the full 17 minutes and 10 seconds of the album version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It’s like Hawkwind meets Hendrix meets Elvis in some bizarre transporter accident that has the King trapped in a psychedelic heavy guitar prog rock opera with set designs by Rodney Matthews. While it may not have Ginger Baker chopping up the beat, nor the strangely evocative lyrics of Michael Moorcock and chums, listening to the full thing has the same spine-tingling effect as watching those last twenty minutes of Manhunter did.

The music’s not that good. It’s not pretty. It’s certainly not clever. But it does reach in and grab you by the gut.

Maybe it’s the whole moving back to Scotland schtick. Maybe it’s because there has been a spate of it turning up as background music on adverts and TV programmes. I dunno. Anyway. I’ve just downloaded a pile of Alan Parsons Project.

Oh my gods. Sorry. I’m just listening to some samples at the Alan Parsons CD sales section and it’s like being whisked back in time.

When I was younger I used to ensconce myself on the sofa at the back of the living room, next to the record player, and sit there listening to weird music through the headphones and reading or writing fiction while the rest of the family watched TV. I don’t know why. I was a very strange child. For whatever reason I did this, it means that I therefore can’t read Frank Herbert’s Dune series without hearing the tones of Spiral and Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis (sadly not available on CD unless you go for the boxed set, which includes the rather execrable Heaven and Hell). The Toto soundtrack for the David Lynch film was just all wrong in a way I couldn’t possibly begin to describe.

My stories all had a background ambience set by the music I was listening to, and I chose the music on the basis of the ideas I was interested in at the time because certain sounds invoked certain imagery and sensations and…

Dammit, we’re back to topography and Munky is going to laugh at me. I guess it must be the synaesthesia again.

Anyway. I suppose that this is why I still prefer to give my stories a soundtrack even now, albeit usually I’m the only one who knows what it is. The Chronicles are the current exception in that I specify the soundtrack for each episode. Hewlett & Martin used to do that for Tank Girl, which I was always secretly pleased about.

A lot of my memories have a soundtrack. Certain albums will bring back memories of driving over to Cockenzie to work on Evarne, just as surely as the smell of sawdust mixed with paint thinner will. If I hear Roxy Music‘s Avalon I might as well be playing the tabletop Space Invaders with my younger brother in the Easdale Inn while drinking watery coke. A lot of the memories seem to have occurred at night. There was a lot of travelling in my childhood, and a lot of being half-asleep in the car while Mum or Dad drove and played various albums on the car stereo.

Other than Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Both of these are exclusively evocative of weekend barbecues after Dad had been diving.

The Alan Parsons Project is another set of boat-type albums. I think Mum and Dad were going through a bit of an APP phase at the time we were working on both Evarne and Blue Kingfisher in the boatyard at Easdale. It’s difficult to be exactly sure, but I suppose this would have been about the time of Chernobyl. I remember working at Easdale at a time when we had to hide inside the car every time it rained because of the radioactive grey ash falling from the sky. Yeah. Sounds about right. Chernobyl was 1986 and the APP is horrendously 80s in a way that even big hair and boys wearing make-up can’t match. It’s the bastard child of 70s prog rock and the new wave electronic faux spirituality that brought us such delights as Electric Dreams and War Games.

Sorry? You thought that War Games was just a hacker movie? You hadn’t spotted the whole thing about the ultimate futility of mutual nuclear proliferation and the macrocosm of global war being played out in the microcosm of tic-tac-toe? Shame on you. That was what the 80s were all about!

You know, I still have the battery-operated stereo we used to use to listen to this stuff. It’s in the bathroom on the cistern of the lavatory. I’ve still got the TV we owned at the time as well. It’s in the kitchen being used as a shelf for my Oakleys and Frood‘s Rudy Projects (yeah – they used to be my Rudy Projects. I upgraded).

To quote Camp Koala: “Some things never change. Anyone for a garibaldi?”

It’s bloody snowing, you muppet!

If this animation thing worked.

Of course it helps if you remember to change the jpg extension in the post template to a gif one, you silly cow.

Why in the name of all that’s sacred did I get up at 05:15 this morning? My eye feels like someone has rubbed sandpaper over it, the cat’s looking at me like I’ve gone mental, it’s dark outside, it’s still snowing, and Munky is still asleep in bed so I can’t even put on the washing machine or make some coffee because both of these things will make too much noise.

What time is it now? 06:15. Ah. Fuckit. I’m pretty sure he should be getting up to go to work sometime soon anyway.