The Hickey Underworld

The Hickey Underworld are a great new guitar band from Belgium. I interviewed them recently and wrote this piece for Crossfire. Nice chaps...

"Any band who are named after a song by Nation Of Ulysses are guaranteed to be men of taste. So when The Hickey Underworld’s debut album landed in Crossfire’s lap a couple of months back it went straight to the top of the towering pile of crap that constitutes rock music in 2009. This is no mean feat. Usually it takes huge bribes to jump the queue...."

Read on...

Currently Reading...

Memoirs Of A Bastard Angel by Harold Norse. This is an amazing memoir by a very recently deceased and highly under-rated writer who bridged the vast gap between Genet and Byron, and should be of special interest to anyone with an interest in 2oth century poetry / modern American culture - not to mention WH Auden, William Carlos Williams, Paul Bowles, Tennesse Williams, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, amongst others.

Carbon

My friend Heidi James' novel Carbon is coming out in English very soon on Travis Jeppesen's BLATT Books.

Watch Heidi talking about the book on Spanish - and some stuff on The Off Beat Generation - here.

You might need to wade through Gael Garcia Bernal's purty face to get there, about ten minutes in.



(Oh, wait, it's in Spanish....)

Down With Liberty...

America's greatest anti-rock star Ian Svenonius (below) has a new band. Chain And The Gang. Have a listen!

Exploration of Place

I've had quite a number of short stories published in anthologies over the past ten years, but the recent Caught By The River one seems to be getting by far and away the most coverage. Here is a great review of it by Lee Rourke in today's Independent.

"Childhood friendships are galvanised by an unsuccessful fishing trip for chub by the Wear in Ben Myers' exploration of place, "The Dirt Waterfall". But it's not all about the architecture of memory. Jarvis Cocker's "South Yorkshire re-creation of Apocalypse Now" is genuinely amusing, even when his River Porter voyage, "Acrylic Afternoons", becomes a metaphor for life...."

The New Walden

Lots of people talk about 'getting closer to nature' or 'living off the land', especially when sitting in hot offices in London or jam-packed into tube trains - something I've had my share of. It's an easy thing to do.

But now that I am living closer to nature I am going to do my best to replicate the dreamy imaginings that filled my head through all those years living in a tiny studio flat in Peckham. I feel I owe it to myself and to those who don't get to fully experience the British summer.

I also want to avoid being one of those feckless wankers who arrives from London and steamrollers over everything. My get-out clause is that I am from the north and am merely returning after a long stint (15 years) of drinking, writing, interviewing bands, running a record label, publishing books, getting up to mischief and avoiding being shanked by my hot-headed south London brethren.

So, in between the journalism stuff and the book-writing stuff, I am intending to clean up the pond (below) that has gone to seed, been filled with litter, treated as dumping ground and just generally left in a state of minor disrepair. What was once a popular swimming and fishing hole (and before that an overspill pond from the mill, now long-since gone) has now been left.

The aim is to encourage more wildlife (there is already bird life, thousands of tadpoles, roach, rumours of pike, mammal holes and a huge heron that lives in the rushes) without messing with things too much. I think it needs to be left while - who wants sanitised, ordered nature?

It's a secret place and should stay that way - but it would be an even greater idyllic oasis without the broken bottles, cans, rusted oil drums and that enemy of the countryside: plastic.

I've just spend three hours down there, surveying the land, shifting abandoned tyres and palettes, hanging bird feeders and getting stung to buggery by the shoulder-high nettles. I could think of no better way to pass the time and intend to keep getting my hands dirty

We have already nicknamed it Walden Pond, in tribute to Thoreau.

Watch this space.

The Secret Pond

Thursday June 25 2009.
07.45am - 09.45am.
Click to enlarge.


































































(I put it back.)

Steven Wells, RIP.

Steven Wells, once of the most singular, hilarious and memorable individuals in British journalism of recent times has died.

I grew up reading his vitriolic energised pieces since my mid teens - Swells was a human bullshit detector and one of the best swearers in the business. A great writer who never did anything by halves. Though I never had a conversation with the man but our paths neared one another's many times - in the lifts at IPC (I was at Melody Maker, he at NME), at gigs, in magazines, in print anthologies. The music business is a fairly small place.

I'm not going to get all sentimental but the afterlife has just welcomed a guy with a really big mouth. It probably needs a shake up up there anyway.

If he exists, God has his work cut out dealing with this mad fucker.

The First Cast Of The Season...

...and I've caught more fish
than in the past two years.










It was only a tiddler but perhaps I've
finally mastered the art of patience.

June 2009 Reading / Listening List

Reading
The Last Mad Surge Of Youth (pictured) by Mark Hodkinson
86'd by Dan Fante
Thongs by Alexander Trocchi
Appetite for Self-Destruction... by Steve Knopper
Selected Poems by Ted Hughes

Listening
Let The Dominoes Fall - Rancid
Maggot Brain - Funkadelic
Mariachi El Bronx - The Bronx
Best Of - Django Reinhart
Now For A Feast! - Pop Will Eat Itself
Straight Outta Compton - N.W.A.

Watching
the sky


















Here is an article I wrote for The Guardian about the infamous US 'Disco Sucks!' gathering / record smashing session of 1979.

And here is a somewhat indulgent recollection of the heady days of mid 90s Britpop, neatly disguised as a review for The Quietus.com of Common People, a new compilation album.

'The Copper-Bottomed Stream'

The copper-bottomed stream
carries messages from the
mind of the troubled wood
to the field's green pages.

It holds secrets in its bubbles.
It is June and the mayfly is
four weeks late but on a day
like this, who is counting?

I have a terrible track record in the music business Part II

Back in 1991 when I was 15, I was big into this band Five Thirty. Looking back, they were clearly Britpop precursors who, after some early flirtations with baggy, also predated the much feted New Wave Of New Wave bands by about three years. They released one album on a major label, then split - under-rated, unacknowledged. This seems to be a recurring theme with the bands that I tend to like - the ones I tip always fail where watered down versions of them succeed. Singer Tara was also briefly in Supergrass early on, then formed a band called The Nubiles who were the first band I ever interviewed, circa 1994. So technically Five Thirty are indirectly responsible for me becoming a music journalist.

Here's a live clip from a show at the Marquee in 1991, which was headlined by the Manics. Though hardly original, Five Thirty were at least ahead of the rest of the indie hordes. While everyone else were grunging it up, they were dressing like mods.

It's these little details that matter.

New House / New Hat / New Sunset

I'll write something new of interest here soon.

"Vote Obama in and I promise / He won't turn into some Uncle Thomas..."

This has probably been all over the 'net for months
and I know it is very 2008, but what the hell....

...Hello Yorkshire

I now live in the countryside.

If you need my contact details, or ever send me free stuff (thanks for that) by all means get in touch: ben_myers@btinternet.com.

And watch this space for the forthcoming launch of an exciting new writing project.