017: "STEPPING ONE BEYOND YOUR SHOW"

Good morning from Yeovil. South Somerset, where… there are sheep outside Burger King??

So: Graham, the local Mobile Bike Repairman, visited recently to fix the brakes on my bicycle. I was having to walk my bike around town like it was, I dunno, Neolithic Fred Flintstone Tech, but minus a squawking pteranodon on the handlebars instead of a bell. The bike was a gift from a pal of my wife, the Amazing Hazel, a couple years ago. It used to belong to Hazel’s son, a frogman in the New Zealand Navy, and was cluttering up her garage prior to a house move. It’s been a real life-saver, to be honest: so, Thank You, Amazing Hazel!

So anyway: Graham rolled up in his van and while he was sorting out my failing brakes he told up some tale about how all the local Council lawn-mowers had been rounded up and could end up rusting away in a storage facility due to them being collateral damage in the recent Somerset Council coup - sorry, I meant reorganisation. The verbal picture he painted was a sad one that resembled the closing scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark: an enormous secret government barn full of ancient petrol-driven mowers mouldering away in the gloom, lit only by a thin shaft of watery sunlight where a roof tile had been knocked lose by corvid vandals or an errant wood pigeon. It was a hidden horticultural treasure, he claimed - a Lawn-Mower Graveyard known only to a few grim-faced bureaucrats serving on some dusty sub-committee in the offices round the corner from W H SMITH. The agrarian equivalent of Area 51. He sighed at the thought as he fitted a new brake-cable and I immediately understood why: Graham was clearly a member of the League of Tinkerers - people who operate from musty old sheds and repurposed 1970s vans, folks who love to fix and play with old, broken analogue tech. Perhaps lawn-mowers had been his first love, but they were too niche to make a living from, whereas bicycles were not. It was a case of The Road Not Taken.

And who could blame him. Who among us has not been seduced by the pollen-saturated, deep summer allure of Genesis’ ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’? A minor lawn-mower-themed hit for the band in 1974, it feels like a down-at-heel post-psychedelic second cousin of ‘Paper Sun’ by Traffic. Apparently, the ‘lawn mower’ noise on the Genesis recording is actually a low-end note played on a Mellotron. Did you know that? No, me neither. But I can clearly remember coming home from school to hear the song playing on the radio as my mum tidied up her bedroom, dust motes drifting in the sunlight that filtered in from the window.

The song’s protagonist has always struck me as being a loner-stoner outsider type who had decided he was happy doing what he was doing - being a grass-cutting groundsman - the drone of his lawn-mower filtering out the babble of well-meaning, but critical voices telling him that he was wasting his life - that he was a loser - when the alternatives they offered him seemed banal and pointless. He felt fulfilled doing what he did: the lawn mower grounded him in some way, was his earthly anchor. It’s likely, given the era, that ‘grass’ might have been a metaphor for drugs, I dunno. Certainly, the song has a subdued melancholic vibe under the droning Mellotron and the sitar riff and the sunny suburban Post-’Penny Lane’ veneer, and I sometimes wonder if it’s grieving for The Sixties as early Seventies culture became increasing dark, cynical and corporate, the landscape more Ballardian. The grass-cutting protagonist occasionally dreams of escaping, possibly even eloping with someone, “hopping over the garden wall” (though someone blows a raspberry at this point in the song, as if that’s a cop-out), fleeing suburbia and his small-minded relatives and neighbours, but he’s weighed down by his own inertia and loneliness.

“Stepping one beyond your show” I’ve always taken as meaning to move outside your comfort zone - to step outside what is expected of you. The Show’: ie a spectacle or distraction that’s been presented to you as a fait accompli reality. But who knows and does it really matter? All other readings of the song are equally valid.

Years later, in 2004, I wrote a piece on the group Shit and Shine for Bizarre magazine - I think I was one of the first people to write about them (12 years before Pitchfork! lol) after hitting it off with band leader Craig Clouse. One of the underpinning conceits of early Shit and Shit was that they supposedly had a mysterious third member who never did interviews or photos, but was a keen horticulturalist who had talked them into using a lawn mower on a recording. (“Larry Mannigan recently won accolades at the Hampton Court and Chelsea flower shows for his glorious rose hybrid named "child of the summer rain", which blooms in mid-November,” proclaimed a press release for their first album on Riot Season). I just dug out back-ups of my old original emails, so I’ll quote from those rather than what actually ended up getting printed in Bizarre. This is Craig, I think, who I’m fairly sure was pretending to be Larry, in answer to one of my questions:

“Well, the mower used on the recording is actually a Hayter Harrier 41 model. It’s the Rolls Royce of mowers. The engine is a Briggs & Stratton Quantum XTS 45. The cutter bar runs at 3000 rpms. Fuel capacity is 1.5 litres. It’s got a cutting width of 410 mm and a cutting height of 13 to 60mm, so you have a lot of range with your grass height. Very important in a mower, obviously. She’s not light, with a dry weight around 35kg, but it’s good to have some weight in front of you while mowing. The job gets done. She is a real beauty, another fine example of the quality of British engineering.”

When I asked if they’d ever played live using lawn mowers, he answered:

“Ahhh, yes, thank you for asking! We played at a church in Rotterdam last year. We had 10 lawn mowers hanging from chains,  just above our heads. Each of the mower’s speeds were adjusted to a certain pitch creating a colossal dronescape through the large hall. It was majestic! The Dutch loved it!”

Later that year I went to see Shit and Shine play in Brick Lane, London, supporting Acid Mothers Temple. No lawn mowers, but they were absolutely fantastic. I got completely trashed backstage with Craig and took a wrong turn from the dressing room while looking for the loo and, for a few seconds, accidentally blundered onstage with AMT. It was one of those nights. AMT’s set ended up being released as a vinyl ‘bootleg’ some years later and I’m fairly certain I can be heard in the audience yelling ‘Awwwright!” at points. Sorry about that.

Craig and his wife, Tara, were living in the UK at that time (they later returned to Austin, Texas, and soon wound up integrating King Coffey from The Butthole Surfers into the new Shit and Shine line-up) and offered, bless ‘em, to come down and play (for free) in Yeovil. I tried to get local venues / promoters interested in putting them on, but no one had heard of the band. the name scared them, I think. I remember one promoter telling me: “If they’re not Ska Punk or Grunge, forget it!” - and I lacked the skill set back then to put on a gig myself or with friends. This would have been with their incredible 3 drummer line-up. Not hosting a Shit and Shine show is one of my life’s great Might Have Beens. I did, however, a bit later, with the help of some pals, put on the great Flemmish Blackened Drone outfit Goatfist. 

Okay, we’ve drifted pretty far off-grid, I think, so let’s wrap all this nonsense up in a neat Möbius Strip. I met Peter Gabriel, former Genesis singer and ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ lyricist, twice. Both times he was incredibly drunk, but also incredibly nice. Once was at a Teardrop Explodes gig, and the other was on the second Human League tour, I think. I never thought to ask him about the song’s lyrics, but both times I bumped into him he bought a copy of the Human Debris fanzine - Humane Debris’ spiritual ancestor. So there’s a nice symmetry to all this musing.

Lawn Mower Conspiracy Theories aside, Graham did a great job fixing my bike brakes. The only problem is that one of the brake disks now makes an odd, slightly eerie sound like the wobbling theremin soundtrack to an old 1950s drive-in sci-fi movie, so that every time I cycle into town I feel like I’m invading Earth.

Until next time…

Keep Them Mowing Blades Sharp!

Yr pal, Kek

Hi. I’m Kek-w… (call me Kek). I mostly write comic books, though I also write books, short stories and films. To relax, I make art and music. Thanks to everyone who’s supported me by buying my books or music - I’m a self-employed weirdo whose oeuvre is somewhere west of the mainstream, so it’s MUCH appreciated.

HUMANE DREBRIS is my attempt at creating a digital bolt-hole away from the divisive, hate-mongering swill of a dead and decaying, plague-infested social media. Call this Post-Social, if you like (I do!). It’s more like an oasis, I hope, than a bunker. You’re among friends here.

Speaking of which, I was gonna run some letters this ish-ep - some of you have responded magnificently to previous emissions of this newsletter, holding forth on all sorts of interesting and bizarre topics - but I think this ish is late and large enuff already. But we’ll dig into the mail-sack next time round and run a few missives! Thanks for making contact! It makes doing this worth while.

SLATE UPDATE

Okay, so my final two scripts for the current Fall of Deadworld series - ‘Justice’ - have been delivered and signed off. So I’m done with that for now. Last Friday, I delivered the script for Part #4 of the other 2000AD series I’ve been writing in parallel to Deadworld . I’ll give you a clue: it’s another Horror strip, though - as I recently said to someone online - I don’t consider myself a Horror writer. It’s just one of a handful of different genres I write in a number of different modes or ‘voices’ - Sci-Fi, Fantasy, War, Humour-Satire, YA, what used to be known as ‘Juvenile’, now rebranded as ‘All-Ages’ - I enjoy ‘em all in different ways. Each tickles a different Thought Bone at different times. I don’t find it hard to switch between them. In fact, I enjoy the incongruity of jumping between different types of writing. It stretches the synapses. It’s fun!

I’ve also written a couple other one-off things for Rebellion that are due to appear later this year. One, I believe, is being illustrated by Clint Langley; the other, I’ve no idea who they’ve assigned. I’ll find out when it’s published.

I’ve also had a small handful of creator-owned things fail to land, which can be disappointing - and occasionally dispiriting - but it’s all par for the course. It’s just the Universe (or your subconscious) telling you that maybe there are other things you should be doing or focusing on instead - things land when and where they are meant to land.

Like this for instance:

About 11 years ago, Shaky Kane and I did a second CAP’N DINOSAUR story as a follow-up to the full-length C’N D comic published by Image Comics. And, a decade later, it has finally found a sympathetic home (above). Wow, that’s quite a line-up! Proud to be part of that.

In between corporate bill-paying work, I’m also picking away at a short book of Weird / Horror fiction, a sort of companion to / younger, idiot bastard brother of this. It will combine a handful of new weird fiction with some shorter unpublished / orphan pieces. At one point I thought about just self-publishing a book of flash fiction, but I decided it needed some longer-form pieces for readers to get their teeth into, and vice versa.

What else? Oh, yeah: I have a new musical release - a split with Doccult - on the Austrian label Noiseversum. It’s part of their Hardcore Space Drone series which has featured some really interesting artists like Samira Arianne. So I reactivated my old BROKEN SKIES Occult Sci-fi / Dark Pacifika alter-ego for this in order to create "We Invoked The Smokeform Of NIYARLĀTHŪLIB, They Who Resonate At 96.3PHz".

It’s mastered by v93r of the legendary Farmers Manual collective. Thanks to Walter B for his kind invite and the fun email chats.

My latest (and largest) and most recent collaboration with noise / art maker VX (Neil Whitehead) is YOU ARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE, a 23.5in x 35in / 59cm x 90cm joint painting that comes with a unique 8 minute piece of music. Sound and object remixing, if you like.

Our first art-and-sound collaboration - BURNT CURTAINS - sold a few weeks back - to someone in Norway! Which is utterly crazy! If the sheer size and intensity of YOU ARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE is too scary for you, then we also have a small n super-cheap collab piece called ZIPPER DISC which might be perfect for your garden shed hideaway or if you wanna piss off yr annoying manager by putting it up in yr workplace cubbyhole then this could be the piece for you. Neil’s and my mission is pretty simple: to make interesting, relevant and affordable art outside the usual over-priced and elitist marketplaces, galleries and gatekeepers. ‘nuff said!

Hmm. A rich person dressed as a bat! He even has a ‘bat-signal’! Gosh, maybe we could make a comic strip out of that! But even this is not the beginning: this 1926 film was influenced by a stage-play of the same name by Mary Roberts Rinehart that was based on her 1907 novel called The Circular Staircase, published four years before the suave and strange Fantomas.

Let’s keep going. Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel was published in 1905, based on a stage-play of the same name in 1903. Raffles, the well-to-do, privately educated, ‘gentleman’ jewel-thief was created a little earlier in 1898 by Ernest Hornung, who was - wait for it! - Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. Raffles is basically an inversion of Sherlock Holmes.

Raffles quickly influenced the creation of Maurice Leblanc’s character, Arsène Lupin, in 1905. Some of the later Lupin stories feature bizarre fantasy and supernatural elements, so we can see how the Gentleman Adventurer with Ambiguous Morals trope quickly slides into more out-there territory. One strand of Raffles / Lupin’s own ancestral DNA can be followed back to Rocambole, whose adventures were published between 1857 and 1869.

Rocambole’s creator was Pierre Alexis, the real-life Viscount of Ponson du Terrail, an aristocrat who started out writing Gothic Horror and Romance. Rocambole’s creation was, in part, a response to Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, whose hero, Rodolphe, is really the Grand Duke of Gerolstein and disguises himself as a worker in order to come to the rescue of prostitutes and thieves. Sue had socialist and anti-Catholic tendencies, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly after the French Revolution. He also wrote The Wandering Jew - a big influence on Michael Moorcock, I would imagine! - and was a contemporary of Alexandre Dumas.

No doubt, the concept of posh person thieves, criminals and adventurers - of people who have fallen from grace, who have lost their land, their title or moral compass (or just want kicks) - pre-dates Rocambole and Rodolphe by centuries, I’m sure. They now occupy some sort of mythic, quasi-fictional archetype space. Robin Hood, anyone? It goes on and on, back and forth through literary history and story-telling: the borrowing, the appropriation-pirating and the mining of ideas and images. In fairness, ideas are notoriously hard to pin down or ‘own’. (Though modern corporations and AI are trying hard to hoover everything up). Ideas are fluid, elastic, slippery. Like songs used to be before 20th century recording technology froze them into easily-recognisable mass-consumption forms. It’s the same with publishing and modern media.

Ironically, I’ve tried to find info about who illustrated that The Bat advertising image that started this line of thought so I could credit them, but the facts are so far eluding me. If you have a hard lead, lemme know! I also started watching some of The Bat last night and there’s a line of thought that suggests it might also be one of the first ‘haunted’ house Whodunnit films too: one where a group of people are stuck in a creepy house overnight with a murderer / thief / escaped criminal / madman plus some comic relief, but I’m gonna stop now before my head explodes…

KEK’S WORD OF THE DAY

Malacology.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

There was so much stuff I wanted to cover last time round but never got to that some of this section will be, by necessity, overspill from the last Ish-Ep mixed in with some red hot new stuff. Here’s one: the latest edition of the CARD MANGO zine by Robert Ridley-Shackleton aka The Cardboard Prince, caught here in late afternoon sunlight a few days ago on a bench at The Cube in Bristol. I don’t laugh out loud at stuff very often, but this zine hit my chuckle-spot:

While I was at The Cube I also snagged a tape of ‘Guaranteed Armour’ by Carnivorous Plants. It’s blown-out, sun-blasted and beautiful. Looove the guitar tone on this - it’s like a lo-fi Maplins Psych take on early 70s Fripp and Eno. I was playing this during my evening walks through the wooded path at the back of the airfield during last week’s heatwave. At Golden Hour, slanted sunlight flickers down through the trees, dancing across the undergrowth like glowing embers, sparkling on the stream below. I emerge and switch across to an overgrown path where I pick a few early blackberries to go with my breakfast the next morning, and this tape is the ideal soundtrack. It’s also just slightly longer than the duration of the walk, so it’s perfect! It’s sold through at Rat Run (though you can still grab a digital copy there), but if you contact Liquid Library I think Owen has some physical comp copies left he can probably sell ya.

On a similar but different tip is ‘Dread Country’ by Carnivorous Plants Trio, a super-limited, hand-decorated lathe-cut vinyl album. A slow burst of pollen-ripe psychedelic sunshine-drone captured in the cool stillness of St. Anne’s church, Eastville, Bristol. I play the vinyl in my ‘office’ / home work-space, but also have a digital version on my phone, ready for when I need to bunker-filter out background noise and free up some brainspace when I’m working in the library (on headphones ‘natch).

I’ve been a fan of Klaus Schulze ever since I heard Irrlicht on an Ohr Records sampler in the mid-70s. This is my third copy of ‘Body Love’ (Vol. 2) since I first bought it in the late 70s. The first two copies, despite being relatively new, were terrible pressings with so much extraneous noise on them that it made the album almost unlistenable, so I sold or traded them on. I snagged this copy super-cheap late last year at a sunday market in Sherborne from a Cornish record-dealer who I’ve never seen before or since. It’s a battered, much-played copy, but actually sounds better than my previous two attempts at owning this. It’s Prime Purple Patch Schulze - ‘Additions to the Original Soundtrack’ (of a porn film by Lasse Braun, hence the salacious cover) - quite stunning - I’ve been playing this to death in recent weeks. Schulze’s throbbing sequencers and lushly melodic improvisations are subtly accompanied by drummer Harald Grosskopf who I’m pretty sure was playing with Manuel Gottsching aka Ashra when I saw him / them perform their New Age of the Earth album in London, 1976. If yr a fan of 70s German electronic music, this is highly Itrecommended.

And finally: one of my favourite albums of 2025 so far: Image by Hypomanic Daydream.

It’s a killer, mixing darkly euphoric Black Metal with Emo and Prog elements, melodic synths that intertwine with grinding riffs and blastbeats, all shot through with a fiercely accessible Pop sensibility. It’s incredibly uplifting without ever being trite. Super-great earworm songs of defiance and solidarity, of resistance and a need for change in these dark days. It never fails to put some fight back in me if I’m feeling tired or low. I’ve been blasting it for weeks, months now. I fuckin’ love it!

The title track, ‘Image’, was my initial way in with its subtly detuned synths, its discordantly downbeat chorus riff, the bursts of gtr shredding and note-bending, the weird little Jon Lord-esque organ flourish, the defiant shout of “Hey!”, its Mind At The End of Their Tether vocals and the refrain of “THIS HAS TO CHANGE!” I was hooked! The rest of the album is a succession of utter bangers. Check it out.

I recently caught up with Marie aka Hyperdeath Girl the one-woman creative army responsible not only for Hypomanic Daydream but also Mesa (“Synth heavy post-metal/death doom heavily inspired by Maudlin of the Well”) with Adam Heller, and a host of other activities:

Hi, Marie! So, where are you based - in Illinois? I'm in the UK, so 'scuse my ignorance, but was there a Metal / music scene in or around Chicago when you were growing up and soaking up formative influences? Did any of that feed into what yr doing now?

“Yes I'm based just outside the city of Chicago, but I'm originally from southern California. I came up in the Metal scene and later the noise/experimental scene in and around Los Angeles.

“Absolutely, my experience of underground music scenes has shaped what I want to do in Hypomanic Daydream, in a lot of ways it's informed in negation to what I saw in those scenes. I grew more towards going to experimental shows in the last few years of living in California because it was full of so much novel performance and a much chiller crowd compared to a lot of the Metal. There's a handful of formerly local bands that I adored and have helped inform what I do: Karas (rich and emotive Post Metal), Teeth (ugly dissonant Death Metal), and Black Sheep Wall (wicked heavy Metalcore Sludge) who I'd try to see as often as I could.

“Most of Hypomanic Daydream's wellspring is based on the archives of obscure music I've been able to find and digest thanks to having access to the internet. A lot of what really inspires the sound is from lists and endless friend's recommendations.

“It's trying to look deep into the unexplored curiosities of Metal and try something New from that base. From that base I try to bring my love for video game music / low-fi synth timbres into the mix along with a creative ethos poorly copied from the Rock In Opposition movement. On top of all that is a personal and earnest reflection of my views and feelings through the lyrics with a small sprinkling of silliness and poppiness to make it all tie together.”

I'm also fascinated by the fact that you have different projects that have different emphases / sounds / music roots? A lot of people tend towards one 'sound' / style / project, but I'm always interested in folks that have musical or artistic wanderlust and switch between things (something I tend to do myself)... Am I right in saying you do yr own art for yr projects too?

“Yeah I've dedicated my life to making stuff, first it was music, then visual art, and now I've been really into making video games. I've got an endless list of project ideas and then tend to range all over the place. I've done all of the art for Hypomanic Daydream so far.

“I'm glad you really enjoy the music and the art as a whole. I'm currently working on designing a video game out of a resource driven card game I designed a while ago.

“I can't wait to release The Yearning upon the world.” 

Thanks, Marie! And I can’t wait to hear it! The Yearning is the new Hypomanic Daydream album which is out later in July and is up for pre-order here.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Remember to take it easy when you can.