Telegraph Review...

... A nice piece here about the Caught By The River Variety Show at The South Bank in the Telegraph's culture section.

Long Division Festival

Big thanks to anybody who came and listened at The South Bank on Friday. It was a beautiful evening.
The band will be re-convening this weekend for Long Division in Wakefield.

The line-up looks great, and it's our last show of the summer while we finish the new record.

Hope to see some familiar faces up there.

Cheers.

CBTR on the South Bank...

... the 5th birthday celebrations for the wonderful Caught By The River are coming up and it promises to be a great event as well as a lot of fun. Some of the site's best contributors in a beautiful space promise to make it a fantastic evening.

Tickets can be purchased here.

A Kind Of Justice...

Firstly, in a rare moment of magnanimity, I will say now that I almost, half agree with some of the chest beating rhetoric we have seen in the UK press today regarding last night's Chelsea 'heroes'. It would be churlish and mean-spirited to deny that there was something wonderful (in the true sense of that word) about watching the improbable unfurling from the impossible in the second half of a thoroughly entertaining game...

However, while I can understand Chelsea players and fans wanting to see an amnesty on the yellow cards shown to their players in the semi-final against Barcelona, I can't help but feel like those suspensions somehow represent the true legacy of the kind of football Chelsea played over the two legs of the match. They didn't play, they defended, and when you defend without the ball for 80-odd percent of a football match, you give away fouls. You give away yellow cards. I cannot see a more logical progression of events than one whereby an entirely negative approach to a match (never more cynically revealed than in Terry's sending off) over both legs results in you having players suspended because they have basically been asked to play against the law of averages with the amount of tackles they have had to make.

Cruel, unjust and unfair is how some Spanish reporters labelled last night, and to an extent that is as true as it ever is in sport, a notoriously arbitrary moralizer, but a sense of justice is visible through those suspensions and for that reason they must stand.

Oh and also a small part of me is pleased to note that Fabregas has still got that cabinet maker on hold...

Like I say, magnanimity has never been my long suit.

Record Store Day...

With all the furore and euphoria surrounding Record Store Day there was an element of poignancy about reading this today. Jason played in Rough Trade's East shop on the first Record Store Day and later that night came to watch the band play at The Windmill, with Centro-Matic. It was a strange day of hanging out with someone we all thought of as a genuine hero. For everyone in the band Jason was right up there with the people whose music had really inspired us into doing what we were doing... So to have him come along to a show, have a few beers with us and talk about Warren Zevon and Waylon and Wallace Stevens was a strange and heady experience. It might as well have been Zevon himself there with us, such is our respect for Jason's art.

Anyway, I wanted to echo the sentiment in this piece and think about a hero facing difficult times...

West Country Girl...

I've written a small piece about this great place I was taken to in Paris a couple of nights ago on the Rough Trade Blog.

It is a really great little creperie that is ploughing a worthy furrow. Great food and drink. Good music.

Sometimes you stumble on a small pocket of something that is about art and love and being human.

It just feels fucking wholesome in a world of shit.

The Brautigan Book Club

Last night I attended my first Brautigan Book Club evening. It was at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club and there were lots of very cool and friendly people there talking about Richard Brautigan and books and art and drinking. It was a lot of fun and I whole heartedly recommend the whole thing to anyone with even a passing interest in Brautigan's work.

There was a really great quasi-poetic discourse on Kool-Aid and it's function in the American counter-culture from Fuchsia Voremberg, and a song by a man called Stephen Caines who managed to play a ukelele without making me want to destroy my own ears. He sang beautifully as well.

Here is the website for the whole deal....