The Suicide Machine was totalled but the band needed to get on the road. The savage city, that Northern beast, the savage city called to us.

The EP got mastered in 3 days, despite everything, and dropped like a neutron bomb in the heart of suburban Wokingham, killing two.

We strapped on the gun-belt, fuelled down on Irn Bru – all necron orange – and fled the screaming mass of London. Scuzzy bus station, all nighthawks and dangermice. Cold burrito, weighty and pliant as an internal organ.

We caught the night pods and slept in submarine bunks. On the road, in the night, amongst the car cries and cat’s eyes.

Stumble off the cruiser into the sun.

There are locations in this ugly world where the ink runs and the music blares and you can feel echoes of my tall existence. Underground punk gigs. Drag shows. Dilapidated theme parks. Glasgow Comic Con is one of those rifts. A place where the costumed tribes of my ancestors, of poets and addicts meet to chew the fat, tear the script, run wild in the concrete caves and jump the fences of reason.

It feels like home.

Getting the word out these days is more difficult. It’s hell for leather, what with the pigs and the NSA and the Administration of Fictional Immigrants.

Keeping us undercover, The Black Hearted Press. These cats are solid like the granite granny. There were other allies to attend, headbutt and grease with love: The Hope Street Irregulars are always a riot – Rob, Adam, Barry and Jamie Amsterdam. The Standard and Exploding Ghost of the Metrodome kids, Simon The Dane Insane. All were newly minted. In they go. Part of the brat pack, the great collection. We’ll be friends.

AND THEN EMILY WAS GONE.

We were on the bill with Team Girl Comics, GLOW, Cosplay Killers & Cosmic Designs – all great acts slicing up the underground and mailing the pieces to your mama.

And then the EP dropped.

The convention hall was a killing floor and we packed the punch. The limited edition pressing sold out, and the word was out on the airwaves.

The doors opened. My favourites arrived. The Readers were in.

Together we held back the hoardes of D-VOID.

At the after-show in a whiskey joint haunted by Charles Bukowski, we slugged under a terrace of vines and talked of the questionable safety measures involved in European water-parks.

 

 

 

 

Special shout-out to my backstage brothers – the heroes of the show: The Sharply-Dressed Space-Cat and The Amateur Astronomer.

 

 

 

 

Glasgow is a ruin. Kaiju attack ebbing.

Raygun Roads has blasted off.

The Infinity Loop Death-Trap is under construction…