End of Tour

Thanks loads to Gravenhurst and everyone who came down to shows this last week. We had an amazing time playing every night and watching their set afterwards. These are some videos of us playing in the main hall of Cecil Sharp House, which is something I've wanted to do ever since I first went there:

This is what I looked like in Newcastle:

And all of us in Leeds:

And Tom with a purse and some merch:

We were all keeping photographic records in our own ways, so more of that soon. .

Nick, Rachael and Claire of Gravenhurst are lovely, and are off on European adventures for three weeks. This is them in Colchester, the last gig we played together:

Some Cross-processed photos

Cross-processing is where you use film like slide film, and then process it as if it were ordinary photographic film, and as a consequence you get these weird distorted colours. Sometimes it turns out great and sometimes it's just odd.

A Sad but Amazing Passage from a book I am reading

This is from 'Tales of Ordinary Madness' by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is one of my favourite authors.

'Christ, there were women everywhere and over 1/2 of them looked good enough to fuck, and there was nothing you could do, just look at them. Who'd ever devise such an awful trick? Yet they all looked pretty much alike - overlooking a roll of fat here, no ass there - just so many poppies in a field. Which one did you pick? Which one picked you? It didn't matter, and it was all so sad. And when the picks were made, it never worked, it never worked for anybody, no matter what they said.'

The thing I like about Bukowski is, even though we're different in a few ways, he's just straightforwardly honest in the way that he writes, and his style is about getting rid of pretension and artifice, a bit like Hemingway, who I think he admired a lot. And you can feel his disdain for the pretentious and the powerful running through his books, next to the low hard life, and these occasional confessions of awe or these sudden overviews which widen the focus right out, from the drinking and the gambling and stuff to the whole wonderful and sorry mess of everything.

http://bukowskiquotes.com/

New Gigs n'ting

So, on the 18th of October we are headlining an Oxjam show at the Victoria in Dalston, (headlining is exciting/scary/good), and on the 22nd November we are supporting Fanfarlo at the Union Chapel. This is a video of them singing: 

Also, tonight we are supporting Woodpecker Wooliams at the Vortex Jazz bar in Dalston. Should be grand, this is her new single, 'Sparrow':

Also, I read this a while ago, it's amazing. Kurt Vonnegut was an eminently sane and wonderful author and general good bloke.

http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/essays-writing/kurt-vonnegut-the-last-interview-and,kurt-vonnegut-tom-mccartan-9781612190907