a month of mondays
interviewing a berlin tour guide, can kicker, a chat with max easton &c.
in the spirit of pull yourself to-goddamn-gether, here’s a dispatch from january, a radio show, some writing, an interview and sundry items:
i forget that submission to the doldrums at this time of year is normal. prefacing or postscripting every voice note with ‘i appreciate its january.’ and here, depression as a local delicacy. true, the garden that is my inner life looks like a berlin balcony in the depths of winter. surviving spiritually here means leaning into dark strangeness and hunting for charm like a truffle in the heartless muck. It does reveal itself, you just have to tune in. I had a decent go at this by diving into the insane history of this place further to try to better understand where we are, to understand the world at this heinous conjuncture. On that topic…
I was absolutely honoured to host Berlin tour guide, Dundee native and excellent punk man Ryan Balmer on da show this month. Ryan’s a genius font of knowledge and chaperone of tourists, who approaches his work with mischief and a political lens. How could you not? We dove into Berlin's relatively recent transition into to being a global tourist destination and what that means for heritage and gentrification, the stories it (and we) tells itself about itself and why, all while casting a critical lens at the work of interpreting history, conflict and its traces on the ground, and hear some wild, hilarious and wonderful stories of encounter direct from the Strasse-Explainer himself. I loved hearing from him about the deep tensions between entertainment and political education that tour guiding as an occupation represents, in a city that has been the worlds go-to ideological projection screen for more than a century. What stories has Berlin the Brand chosen to tell about itself since its relatively recent transition into to being a global travel destination, and whose interests do they reflect? What were the facts about life in the GDR and why do the fictions still sell so much better? Heritage, Bowie, Gentrification, the guy who has the trademark for all the Ampelmännchen merch, Isherwood, Shawarma, the sinister logic holes in today’s rememberance culture, and a sweetly uplifting musical survey of tunes on the theme of travelling through, where Ryan’s Scottish origins get a strong showing.
Can Kicker - Yew
Since winding up the record labels I did and the end of Maximum Rock n Roll where I was a columnist in the print mag for nigh on a decade, I rarely get time to write about music. Reviews and blurbs are some of the forms of writing I enjoy most because short, sweet, sharp, doesn’t need an arc and so on. I occasionally get asked to write blurbs for bands, but, much in the way that I could never be a Music Journalist, can only really bring myself to do it if I like the record. When Luke from Cardiff-based group Can Kicker hit me up about blurbing their self-released LP, I was intrigued but also not sure what to expect. I’d already started writing by the time the third song started.
Despite my personal belief that anarchism itself is Fine Until You Need To Change Anything At Scale, my abiding love for anarchopunk as a sound will never be extinguished, no matter how many Americans continue to desecrate its memory. Huge riffs and not short on wonder, YEW is introspective rather than didactic, recalling the output of all the best loony leftis of the time that read a little too much Tao (this Flux record is my absolute go to) and got freaky and major-key wid it, bashing a path through the forest to lie among the rocks.
The artwork for YEW is an etched piece of slate by a Welsh stonecarver Morgan Owain Edwards, who is based in Copenhagen. Luke tells me he is originally from Corris. “The slate he etched the artwork into is one he found near his home before leaving for Copenhagen, which he bough with him. He sent it to myself, and my partner Nia’s dad Ieuan photographed it. Ieuan is also from Corris.” Slate was mined industrially in this area of North Wales more than any other part of the world at its high point, and the landscape bears the scars, but much in the way that scars can be beguilingly attractive, I was animated to see that name, which immediately brough to mind trips driving up to see family in north Wales, and the dramatic moment each time cresting the hill where the sky for a moment would go completely grey due to the hillside showing us its inside. The Slate mines in Corris were operational continuously from 1787 until 1970.
Corris Luke was suitably chill and humble when I was outraged that the labels they’d sent it to hadn’t immediately jumped on it. Given the extent of the phoned-in bullshit music that international DIY punk seems to be content with in the post pandemic era, its truly wild to be me that fully formed ideas like this don’t get jumped on, but such is the way! YEW is available as a CD-R, on tape or on bandcamp. When the tastemakers are done releasing seventh-rate Blitz derivatives I hope one of them gets onto this and puts this absolute slapper out on vinyl! You can read my blurb below.
"It is possible to split slate - the metamorphic rock featured on the cover of this, the second LP from Wales’ Can Kicker - into an almost infinitely thin number of slices. Forever splitting apart then reassembling, remade under a constant weight, ‘Yew’ is a haunting survey of the psychic wages of an inner war against defeat. Can Kicker deform and reform all the sideways best bits of the UK anarcho sound: pummelling rhythms not out of place on a Corpus Christi compilation meld with plaintive sing-song vocals that will delight Zounds and Magazine fans alike. ‘Cariad’ is a standout, unspooling like a lost Omega Tribe single, a manic syncopated romance about running across common land looking for burial mounds, holding hands like there’s no tomorrow and beseeching your beloved in Welsh.
Can Kicker is no fetishistic retread, no, instead they confirm the horseshoe theory of bleakness best exemplified by The Mob: when explorations of the crevices of human despair go deep enough, dark enough, all that extreme downward pressure produces a kind of ecstatic hope, magic moments of spine-tingling sonic and spiritual resolve!
Written in Cardiff and recorded in Bristol in a studio already demolished to build luxury accommodation, ‘Yew’ is a plea from somewhere deep for something different, and a prayer for the sanctity of all that is locked between our layers of hate and fear. Amid so much ambient grief, this is music for forcibly hauling oneself out of the eternal doldrums, a way out of the woods, bloodshot eyes to the grey horizon, chipping away at an uncarved block to reveal a new self, a new world not far behind."
Q&A-005: "'WE'LL FIGURE IT OUT' IS A RELIGION" - an interview with Bryony Beynon (THE SPIRAL TIMES, GOOD THROB, BB & THE BLIPS)
I have two sisters and many brothers. The brothers all share something other than blood with me, but occupy a particular place in my head and heart. My special boys! Max Easton is one such platonic ideal. Our neurotic intellects immediately gravitated towards each other when I landed in Sydney in 2017 and before long we started playing music together, bantering lambasting sharing pet hates obsessions and sometimes rubbing each other up the wrong way like only people who understand each other can. What if Think.. but Too Much? Like me, he’d always written punk polemic for zines and online and honed a written voice in only the way having an audience exclusively of the worlds most highly judgemental yet also hanging-on-yer-every-word type peers will do. His backstory had included stints as a competitive Rugby League Player and a research scientist with a patent for something which he explained to me many times that I stubbornly refused to understand. He would go on to become an award winning novelist. He also built up his ‘Barely Human’ project, comprising his writing, podcasts and zines which all take the ideas and influences of bands he likes as a springboard for thinking through (sub)culture and asking why/where next?
I was humbled to be able to do an extremely indulgent and long interview and exchange with him for Barely Human Q&A series. We talk about endings, the practice of radio broadcast, whether selling out exists as a concept anymore, we realise we’ve both taken on the opinion the other used to have about one or two things, finding out a former bandmate was a zionist, the ghosts of DIY spaces past, writing from life without telling everything and much more.
Max sent me these generous questions in Spring 2023 and I responded to them over Christmas 2024. Inexcusable I know. Being honest, there was something I avoided in or maybe under his questions, a feeling of foreboding that to answer them would be on some level to make decisions about how I feel about what I’ve been doing since I last saw him in 2019 (when we made an as yet unreleased record called The Sickness for our old band BB and the Blips, which is about a pandemic.) I continue not to be sure of any answers, but finishing this up was therapeutic. Something something life lived in chapters something something line in the sand. Max has an uncanny knack for pinpointing the structures of feeling in the secret shared memory of grassroots music communities and social worlds that will never make the history books, but make and remake our silly lives, which glowing reviews of both his novels can attest to. I am blessed to have collided with this big ol’ brain. Read the interview in full here.
Five other things I have enjoyed in the bad January:
1. the full body involuntary libidinal response that punctured my long held incelibacy when happening upon the fact that Harris Dickinson used to skate South Bank.
2. watching the television programme ‘Severance’
3. Waiting for a burger after an exhausting day trying and failing to make money, a grinning old man hawks bottles lemon hand sanitiser insistently with a full speech until bossman cracks, gives him two euros to make him go away, then opens it up for us, a squirt into our palms, then surprises himself, visibly transported by the pungent honk.
‘just a little alcohol and lemon’
he pauses ‘every house in turkey.’
4. DLX ADV live at 90Mil.
5. naked in the woods and two degree water ice spike dip at Kleiner Dabersee with Katie and Lisa. we went in twice and had cake after this time. as a succession of nice little traditions made more and more elaborate with each passing year, this life is quite enough.
"...hunting for charm like a truffle in the heartless muck" >> will now think of this metaphor while taking those grayest-day mental health walks. never seem like they will turn anything up, until they do.
really enjoying uncarved block...