018: NEW ADVENTURES IN RURAL-URBAN EXPLORING

Good morning from Yeovil. South Somerset, where holes started appearing in the ground during the arse-end of Summer:

I spotted it late one morning while having a post-coffee wander-around and A Think. I had a pretty good idea who was probably responsible: ****, a local street-artist. (I’m keeping his identity secret for reasons that will become obvious later). It had his M.O. written all over it. He’s a bit of a ‘burrower’ / urban-explorer, shall we say.

Another photo for context (bear with me; this gets weirder as it goes along):

A couple days later, that whole frontage in the photo above had been boarded up - presumably by the Council, ‘cos the property’s owners are unlikely to be even vaguely local. So I’m stood there, contemplating the Berlin Wall of Fibreboard that’s been freshly erected when, by coincidence, **** rocks up and confirms that, yes, the hole was made by him in the wee small hours a couple nights earlier so that he could have a discrete look around inside and see if the premises were suitable for squatting. However, about 24hrs after he snuck in, one of the local street drinkers decided to investigate at 1am in the morning, while drunk / high, not realising there was a 10 - 15ft drop down from the wooden joists visible under the board that **** had prised up, down into a deep cellar. Parts of Yeovil are honeycombed with tunnels - under old pubs, long-gone breweries and various churches - there’s a potential post about this topic alone, but not today. In his confusion, this other dude fell down into the pitch-black pit below (**** had gone in equipped with lights and assorted kit, being an old, experienced burrower-squatter), injuring himself and getting disorientated and lost in the dark below. Somehow - and the story gets vague at this point since it involves at least two unreliable narrators, shall we say - he somehow managed to climb back up, but then got stuck between the wooden joists, his legs dangling over the abyss below.

Luckily, his small hour pleas for help were heard and assistance was summoned. But, to get him out, they had to use some sort of hoist or small crane to pull him free. Apparently, it was quite a palaver. Obviously, the doorway then had to be sealed off to stop other people from falling into The Porter Black Pit . “But it’s okay,” said ****, tapping his nose and laughing, “I know another way in that I can use when the heat’s died down.” (And he did).

Fast forward a few weeks and I bump into **** scurrying around town on one of his frenzied salvage hunt missions. I ask him if he’s still at his camp, hidden away on the edge of the town centre where he had built a ramshackle living-space and made his art: he even had a smelting set-up where he would melt down metal and glass that he had scavenged into strange shapes, and had invited me up there to photograph and document it. He told me had temporarily left his camp because of the arrival of some “aggressive assholes” among the local street people and had moved into the abandoned remains of The Mermaid Hotel. Did I want to come and have a look? I did!

Some context: The Mermaid is a legendary Yeovil watering-hole, but long closed. I drank there regularly from the mid-70s up until the Acid House / Rave Era. You could go in there any night of the week and there would be loads of people you knew hanging out. I met some amazing weirdos in there over the years and had some incredible (and not-so-incredible times) there. It’s loaded with memories. It’s also the place where, when the Teardrop Explodes came to play a gig at Yeovil College - which got aborted due to the incompetence of an acquaintance of ours, John Friend - Julian Cope then dropped acid in his hotel room in The Mermaid and spent most of the night laying on the floor of his room thinking he was a city centre. This was documented (though it’s been years since I’ve read it) in Julian’s book, Head On, in the chapter entitled ‘Get Outta Yoville’ (sic). I think Julian and drummer, Gary Dwyer, tried to go down to the bar for a drink, but were hallucinating so heavily they walked into a Fear and Loathing type scenario where all the locals had dinosaur / pterodactyl heads and the carpet was a swamp of blood so they retreated back upstairs and locked themselves in their rooms. Chris Lowe, the proprietor of Acorn Records in the recently-demolished Glovers Walk, told me that a suitably, er, fried Julian came in the next day and bought a vinyl copy of a Neil Young album (I think it was Hawks & Doves?).

So, yeah, ‘course I wanted a look around! **** told me: the cops knew he was in there - they had visited him a couple times. He had his gear in there and they knew had taken occupation of the premises, so we weren’t Breaking and Entering. They had warned him that a security company would be boarding the place up in a couple days time, so he would need to move before then. “But there’s a big difference between what they say and what they do,” he told me. Meaning: it might be 2 days or a month. Meanwhile, if only temporarily, he had a roof over his head.

The big black front gate which opened out onto the top of Middle Street which I always assumed had been locked since the pub had closed, wasn’t. It just looked like it was, so he just discretely popped it open and in we went. Lunchtime shoppers walked past, oblivious. Inside was the old double door that I knew so well from Times Past. That was still locked up, but someone had smashed out the glass on the top of one of the doors years earlier. **** had propped two chairs up either side, so you had to climb up and squeeze through the shattered pane, being careful not to catch your bollocks on the shards of glass still in the frame. It was like straddling a very high country stile that someone had booby-trapped. But we were now into the old bar and restaurant area. There was no power or water in the place - just ambient lighting - and in places the floor and ceiling had partially collapsed (or been pulled up). Here’s some murky photos of downstairs, in what used to be the bar. Have memories of playing Asteroids, Tron, Defender, etc in here:

He then showed me upstairs. The pub’s women’s toilets were up there, I remembered from years ago, but I had never actually been up to the next level. (A bit like playing Asteroids). Most of that floor was in darkness: some stretches were completely pitch black and **** had wedged open a Fire Door so he could safely come and go. “You wouldn’t wanna get accidentally locked in here by yourself with no light,” he said ominously. “You’d freak out!” He was right: the place was incredibly spooky when you could see where you were, like a Haunted House sideshow at the local Fair. We were using phone torch-apps to navigate the darkened stairs and narrow corridors. It reminded me of The Backrooms or some similar haunted Liminal Space; I half expected some spidery pencil-thin creepypasta-entity to suddenly scuttle past and disappear into a dust-filled cleaning-cupboard. There were still wall fittings, paintings, prints and old mirrors here and there: old decorative crap that looked like they had been there since the 70s / 80s. Occasionally, you would find inexplicable things like this, stuff left behind by previous transient occupants:

The hotel used to be, I believe, an old coaching house. There is a courtyard and large gates that open out onto Princes Street (though that entrance has been sealed off for ages), which I imagine you could have once lead your horses into and perhaps even stabled them? Well, a floor or two up we found some unboarded windows that looked out onto part of the building’s old roofscape - parts of the building you can’t see from either street.

We picked our way up onto the top floor: more creepy, dark, half-empty hotel rooms and claustrophobic walkways. **** took me back down to the area he’d claimed as his living-space: a couple of rooms, one with an old double bed in it (the first time he had slept in a proper bed for years, he told me). He encouraged me to photograph and document everything, as he had in his earlier camp: “Everything is transient,” he said and shrugged, echoing something Ken Kesey had once said in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. “Just like Life.” But I told him I didn’t want to intrude on his personal space. Even if he was only here for a couple days, this was his for now. He’s spent over two decades off-grid, living on the streets, in camps self-built from salvage; it didn’t feel right photographing / sharing his personal retreat. His life is precarious enough as it is. He shrugged again: like, it’s no big deal, dude.

He had prised back the boards up here to let some daylight in. It was weird looking down on the street below - a road that I walk down most days - from this unfamiliar vantage point. I thanked him for sharing all this, for letting me see things from this other side of the ‘curtain’. We made our way back down through the gloom, over broken floorboards, shattered glass, back out through the two-chair exit-window and slipped back through the front door to rejoin the foot traffic outside. No one noticed or cared.

A day or two later, my friend, JM, texted me to say that there had been a fire at the Mermaid Hotel. Somerset Live described it as “an unfortunate accident”. I bumped into a pale, freaked-out **** who confirmed this. The building had no water supply and he couldn’t stamp out the flames quickly enough, so he had grabbed a few belongings and legged it before the fumes got to him. A day later, the building’s out-of-town owners put up metal shutters and a series of contractors started arriving to assess and begin the process of converting the hotel into, you guessed it, flats.

**** later moved back into his old camp and started getting ready for Autumn.

Stay warm, all of you.

Yr pal, Kek

Hi. I’m Kek. I write for a living, mostly comics, but not entirely.

HUMANE DREBRIS is an attempt to escape the necrotic, divisive, billionaire-owned social mediascape before it drags us all down with in, writhing and screaming, into the Fifth Circle of AI Slop. I wanted to create a sanctuary for like-minded weirdos with similar interests - comics, pulp, art, music, film, weird lit, etc - somewhere to reboot our poor, dopamine-depleted branes away from all the digital noise. I hope you find this a more friendly experience than eeek Fashbook and some of the other Hellish boreholes.

This year, I’ve probably made more Art than I have in many years. Tbh, I really think it’s helped keep me sane. I originally started selling pieces on Bandcamp. But recently, I started putting up a wider variety of artwork on Vinted. I listed a handful of things on my old Etsy shop as an experiment, but Etsy listings get very little visibility unless you pay ‘em for views. Vinted seems more active and busier. If you’re on any of these sites, some Follows and Likes would be very much appreciated, cheers. I’m trying to keep my art independent, diy and affordable, like my music. And if you know anyone who might enjoy this newsletter, please point ‘em at the Subscribe Page, thx.

Anyways, I’m way, waaaaay behind putting out a new issue-episode of HUMANE DEBRIS. I apologise, but I’ve been super-busy. Thanks for your patience, and let’s see if I can get back on track. The Readers Letters section will return next time round, I promise! I get some really fun, interesting and informative mail from you all. Keep ‘em coming!

SLATE UPDATE

I’ve been writing a lot of comic book pages in the last 2 -3 months - all year, in fact; tho September was particularly busy - but not much of it seems to have been solicited yet. Here’s one exception: The Judge Death Mega-Special 2025, to be released very soon - just in time for Halloween, I suspect - to celebrate the 45th anniversary of your favourite Dark Judge, Sidney De’Ath. Earlier in the year, I was asked to write a special wrap-round bookend story, a prologue / epilogue to pull the whole collection together. I created a piece that a explores the origin of a certain arcane piece of Dark Judge lore. The great Dave Taylor started to illustrate it, but sadly passed before he could finish the strip. I think artist, Stewart Kenneth Moore, may have taken his place. A few weeks ago, I got to meet and chat briefly with superstar artist, Brian Bolland, locally about the special and other stuff. He illustrated the cover beautifully, as you would expect from one of the Dark Judges’ co-creators. One of my first published pieces (as an artist!) that wasn’t in a xeroxed fanzine, but in a semi-pro magazine, was in 1978 alongside a young pre-Dredd Brian. So this all feels nicely circular and symmetrical. I couldn’t imagine back then that decades later I would be writing classic characters for 2000AD. Weird.

Here’s another reminder that both A1 and Deadline are returning - two legendary British publications in one comic: A1DEADLINE - courtesy of the mighty Dave Elliot.

The Kickstarter is here. And I think it all gets going on Oct 21st.

Oh, and the comic features a deranged CAP’N DINOSAUR mini-adventure by myself and artist, Shaky Kane.

Next Saturday (18th October) I’ll be appearing at INVASION 2025 at Taunton Library with Shaky and a host of other comic-books-y people. Come and say HELLO!

I was hoping to get a new prose book finished ready for the Taunton Con - a new Weird Lit anthology that’s a ‘sequel’ of sorts to THE NEW ABNORMAL - similar, but different - but despite hammering out around 19k of wordage in the last month or two the final story still isn’t quite there yet. Nearly there, though. Reckon it might be done next time round, so hopefully an update on the new book in the next issue-episode.

What is nearly done, however - and with the wind in the right direction I might even have some physical copies ready for Taunton - is a new EP of electronic music with my friend Paul Maskell, the proprietor of The Beat & Track record shop in Sherborne, just over the Dorset border. Paul produces and records music as Outtract, and we’ve teamed up to make a 25 minute collection called RELAY - ‘cos it’s like a relay-chain with Paul and I remixing / reworking each other’s subsequent versions of a single ‘seed’ piece of music. The results are extremely cool, each version going somewhere new and unexpected. We’re just waiting for the CD to get professionally duplicated, and hopefully they will be available in a few days’ time. It’s in a jewel-case and everything! S’gonna look and sound awesome!

Oh, and I was also recently asked to do a couple of remixes of the Organza Ray material recorded by Eleni Poulou, Hilary Jeffery, Tom Bugs and myself in Bristol last year. The edits of the music we produced together sound brilliant and this’ll be appearing as an album soon. Oh, yes.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

And, speaking of Organza Ray: they recently released a v cool collaboration with legendary German musician and Neue Deutsche Welle pioneer, Pyrolator, aka Kurt Dahlke who was also in D.A.F., Der Plan, etc, etc.

GONEMAGE’s most recent mash-up of Black Metal and Proggy Chip-Tune Game-Synth vibes really hit a spot for me, as did their wonderfully convoluted track titles and the overarching conceptual-continuity of it all which reaches back into their own back-catalogue as well as overlapping with the musical universes of other fellow travellers. visually and aesthetically, it’s a little like the Black Metal equivalent of Icepunk. The music reminded me a bit of the wonderful genre-mashing work of Hypomanic Daydream - who, if you recall, we had chat with last ish-ep. I then spotted, an hour or two later, that Marie from HD actually guests on one of the tracks, which makes perfect sense. Du’h!

Marie released the Maladaptive EP back in August, which she self-describes as: “A small taste of the new direction of Hype-O, Retro FPS OST inspired industrial metal club music. Built around sampled guitars and low-poly boomershooter darkness, Maladaptive sets forth the first ripples of a new diversion. The only comparisons I can draw are Pretty Hate Machine-era NIN, Techno Animal, The dancey / electronic side of Dodhiemsgard, and the industrial side of Nailbomb.” ‘Nuff said! Don’t take my word for it, but it’s boss!

Last night (Saturday 11th) I went to the THE UTOPIA STRONG / ANDREW LILES show in Glastonbury, about half an hour up the road from us. Last time I saw Liles, he was playing in a duo with Maniac, the singer from the Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem, in a de-sanctified church in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, in 2009, I think. Maniac sang from up on high in an old high stone pulpit, looking down over the pews, lit by flickering candles. Now, did I imagine this or did he drip wax from the candles onto his nipples during the show? Sounds pretty plausible.

No nipple-dripping this time, but Liles opened with a morbidly-slow, minimal drum banger that sounded like the missing link between Early 00’s Dubstep and 2nd-wave UK Industrial: some lost, spooky-sounding Dub by Coki or Loefah. I’m afraid he lost me for most of the (sample-heavy) middle-section of his set: it felt like a bit of a (albeit modern-sounding) throwback to the old Nurse With Wound / Current 93 era - something I’m just not really feeling any more - accompanied by kaleidoscopic visual collages lifted from Fantastic Voyage, Kinetic Art shorts, etc. Things picked up again (for me) in the last third of his set with a piece that sounded like a mosaic of mangled Philip Glass samples from the early / mid 70s, then an EBM style mid-tempo 80s Euro-banger and another minimalish Creepstep track. There was a lot of stylistic lucky-dipping going on during his set, some of which didn’t land for me tbh, but there were two or three pretty enjoyable pieces bookending it all. And it was great to be able to go and see something like this so close to home. “Was that footage of Yootha Joyce in your visuals?” I asked him afterwards. “Indeed, yes,” he replied.

I’ve been wanting to catch The Utopia Strong for 2 or 3 years now, and was hoping they would play Glastonbury again eventually (as Kavus and Mike both live nearby). And my patience eventually paid off. I’m not a Cardiacs fan, but in the last 18 months or so I’ve caught Kavus playing with Gong (in Lyme Regis!) and playing a solo set here, at the same venue, The King Arthur. Both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m also cough a bit of a synth nerd, so seeing a band with two modular rigs is an easy sell where I’m concerned. For those of you who are blissfully unaware: yes, this is the band that contains former snooker star, Steve Davis. So let’s just get that out of the way, okay?

If you go to see them expecting thumping Club music, gnarly maelstroms of gNoise or shrill, pick-up-shredding riffery, then yr gonna be disappointed. But what TUS do exceptionally well is play a specific variety of improvised, slow-burn, Psych-tinged British Kosmische as exemplified by the gorgeously glacial first few minutes of their set. It’s slightly ‘mannered’ - call it Dadrone or Britmische, if you must - but that’s no bad thing - actually, perhaps ‘considered’ might be a better word. It’s the result of decades of listening to the early Virgin Records catalogue and wondering what a sequencer was - is it the machine that makes those jumpy, repetitive synth arpeggios (though I definitely know I didn’t know what that word meant back then)?; a gentle sprinkling of the slooow builds on early 70s Gong albums, perhaps - Gilli Smythe space whispers and gliss gtr - a touch of Klaus Schulze or Tim Blake, etc. Yeah, maybe all that, but also fed through a 30 year filter of musical curiosity: the later awkward Anglo-messiness of This Heat, Fred Frith’s Guitar Solos, Zoviet France, early Hafler Trio, etc, etc: it’s a particular / peculiar wedge-thread of Very English Electronic Experimentalism that’s become slightly formalised over the years, almost suburban, but I really like it - almost in spite of itself. Probably ‘cos I ‘get’ it and ‘cos it is, partly, the path I trod too. It sits to one side of the MegaDog Crusty Continuum an’ all that, but it still wears it’s tatty old hippy-hat with pride.

I love that TUS are 100% improvised (and, honestly, you try coaxing linearity and consistency out of a modular rig: even if you think you know yr way round it, it will Wonk Out and bite yer arse every single time; predictability is not what it does nor is it what it is meant to do), yet there’s a splendid, I dunno, cohesion in / to their music: the first 10 minutes of this set were pitch-perfect, and I mean that in terms of how the guys and their gear meshed with one another: everything fitted and flowed into itself, which is fucking miraculous given the equipment and the people involved. I know, from personal experience, just how hard it is to get into that sort of Flow State with two other people and a stageful of malfunctioning electronics and toys and junk. I love(d) watching them, because of the way they interacted and listened to one another; there was a genuine friendship and warmth flowing back n forth in sync with the music. That’s a big part of their appeal, I think, from my own personal p.o.v. certainly. Also, they a VERY different vibe to, say, seasoned performers from the UK Improv Circuit. It’s Improvisation, not Improv. Michael J York (Coil, Witching Tale, Mediaeval Baebes, etc, etc) brings a timeless, non-Pentatonic Ethno-Psych-Folk vibe to the proceedings with his collection of weird n wonderful wind instruments and bagpipes (some of which he made himself, I believe); both he and Kavus are also masters of loop-pedal / longform delay trickery so that slices of sound drift in and out of focus like some bleary-eyed form of HippyFrippertronics, rubbing up against Kavus’ harmonium (which has its own dedicated pedal-board!) and Steve’s Eurorack drones and bubbling sequences. Occasionally, Kavus will add blocks of guitar to the mix, some finger-cymbals, wordless vocals, or underpin a sequence with live bass guitar punctuation. I can’t remember whether it was him or Steve Davis who once said in an interview: “Every band should have a member who’s a non-musician.” But, of course, like Steve, I’m totally biased on that front.

Anyway: I loved it.

My youngest daughter asked if we could feature her seasonal nails, as they also featured a cat as well as Halloween imagery. So, here they are:

A cat! Which leads us nicely into…

CHILL WITH KIKI

Have a great October / Halloween!

Kiki wants to know where her catcrack Dreamies are! She’s worse than Kate Moss to work with. Just ask David Bailey. Meeeow!