Banjo Chutney

I’d just got out of the shower on Friday evening when I found out that Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys had died. I knew about his struggle with cancer, but it still seemed sudden and shocking.

I reacted by going downstairs, telling my wife and putting ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn’ on the stereo. I sat there in my damp towel, nodding along. When it got to the verse where AdRock tells MCA to ‘get on the mic’ (~2m30s in), I’m not ashamed to say I cried.

Like a lot of people who were 10 or 11 year old boys at the time of the release of ‘License to Ill’, I idolised the Beastie Boys. They were the first band I loved, and they’ve been there ever since - and they evolved and matured along the way. I missed Paul’s Boutique first time round, but bought ‘Check Your Head’ on release - and loved it (partly because it saw them return to playing instruments). Like ‘License…’ I would listen to it on repeat.

It’s the first time I’ve ever cried at the passing of a musician (or any other famous person) - but MCA wasn’t just a musician. He was multi-talented, an activist and a very cool performer. And for the record, when I was 11 he was the Beastie I most wanted to be.

RIP MCA

This article originally appeared in Black Sunday zine. Contact Katie Dirge @ http://www.thehouseofdirge.com/ to get a copy.

Bloodsuckers wearing lipstick may be flavour of the month in the cinema multiplex, but popular culture’s monster of the decade is less coiffured and doesn’t have the powdery make-up of a 17th Century French aristocrat. The creature that encapsulates the fevered modern era is a shambling, ragged stump of a human - it’s the breed of living dead that stumbles around the streets craving fresh brains.

There are an untold number of zombie-centric films, games, comics, literature and even live-action role-play games that you can sign up to today, should you wish to pretend the apocalypse is upon us. Zombies have certainly captured the public’s imagination, but what is it about a drooling crowd of pus-filled, rotting meatbags that so tickles our refined modern sensibilities? The first written zombie story dates back to the Bible - for what was Lazarus if not a corpse made to walk? So why, all of a sudden, are we so obsessed with the idea that the dead are going to rise out of their graves and eat us alive?

Zombies are in no way a new phenomenon - the living dead can be found in many forms of folklore and mythology, along with other traditional nasties such as vampires, werewolves and ghosts. But the recent influx of zombies into popular culture forms consolidates their position more formally in the modern hive mind.

George Romero brought zombies to the big screen, and into the mainstream psyche with a shotgun blast, in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead - a hugely successful horror flick that shocked audiences at the time with its graphic scenes of cannibalism and dismemberment. The film has been revised numerous times since, undergoing colourisation, and was brilliantly remade by special effects wizard Tom Savini in 1990.

But more than 60 years before Romero’s box-office success, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft explored the dangers of raising the dead in his macabre short story, Herbert West - Reanimator, a grisly tale of grave-robbing scientists experimenting with life-giving serums on fresh corpses. Although Lovecraft is rarely explicit when depicting the subsequent terror (being a stickler for realism and scientific explanation and often preferring to infer that the protagonists have descended into insanity), the story culminates in the revelation that the scientific experiments have resulted in homicidal abominations that roam the land, bound to their vengeful vendettas.

Lovecraft came upon a theme that has lived on in zombie mythology - that humankind, through an abuse of science, brings about its own destruction… and the living dead are the instrument of that destruction.

There are other narrative functions that zombies fulfil in literature and film. In John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, David’s undead best friend Jack is a messenger from beyond the grave. Jack’s role in the film is to steer the outcome by confirming David’s fears - that he is a werewolf and that he must kill himself to end the curse. And in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Shadow’s wife Laura fills a similar role, not only being an undead messenger of the beyond - she is also Shadow’s guardian angel, albeit a walking dead angel.

A whole century before Lovecraft’s tale of scientific experiments on cadavers, Mary Shelley created the first popular culture manifestation of a zombie in the pages of the classic Frankenstein. The monster of Shelley’s book is not only living and breathing, but conscious - it thinks and feels. And here is a key difference to the contemporary soulless undead mob, who are, without exception, an unthinking, inarticulate bunch, bound solely to wanton destruction and selfish feeding. Frankenstein’s monster, rejected by society, is not only capable of expressing emotions - it is driven by its loneliness.

There is hardly a more obvious representation of ‘the outsider’ than Frankenstein’s monster. The trials it undergoes reflect the fears and turmoil that permeated Shelley’s own life at the time. Conversely, the contemporary zombie horde found in modern cultural references represent a very different set of fears. They represent, by turns, the power of the unthinking masses, societal breakdown, a void of identity and the death of individualism.

Those fears certainly stem from the issues currently facing us as a society - economic chaos, rapid globalisation, homogenisation of culture, information overload, the (perceived) erosion of social values and the (very real) inequalities in the distribution of wealth. All of these combine to create a very real feeling that we need to ‘reboot’ society and build something that actually works.

And that’s exactly what many of the modern zombie stories are telling us, whether the explanation for the dead rising is scientific or spiritual. The Walking Dead is no different to The Stand or The Road in that respect - the message is that it’s time to clear the pieces from the board, line them up again, pick sides and begin the fight for survival. There’s no sign of a scientific (or spiritual) breakthrough in reanimation of the dead (at time of writing), but it never hurts to stock up on tinned food.

I started a short story this week - so far I’m about 1500 words in. In fact I started it a couple of weeks ago, with a few notes jotted down in a pad. But this week I started typing it up and fleshing it out.

It’s been a while since I did any creative writing, and most of the creative stuff I’ve done hasn’t had too much structure or planning - it’s all been about spontaneity and stream-of-consciousness silliness. So this is a learning curve.

I’ve noticed a few things about the process. Firstly, you need a great idea to begin with - one that you believe in. But that’s not enough - you need layers, for depth, and you need truth, for the characters and dialogue to be believable. You also need to stick with it.

Which brings me to this: the idea will always be better is always in danger of being better than the implementation. Unless you achieve perfection in the art of translating your idea into a text. That’s the key bit, then. That’s the bit that people always go on about - artists striving for perfection in their work.

And that sounds massively pretentious in the context of writing a piddling little short story about small-time thuggery. So I’ll move on to my last point: carrying a notepad. I started doing this about six months ago and it contains all sorts of useless brain-farts - poems, song-titles (for songs that will never be written) and outlines for other short stories (that may or may not ever be written).

But it also contains a load of notes on my current short story, which I add to all the time. Even today, whilst out on a bike ride, I saw something that sparked a thought process that led to further development of the story. So I stopped, sat down, got out my notepad and wrote down my notes.

With This is England ‘88 about to grace our living rooms, there’s no better time to have a read of a (slightly fanatical) feature I did on Shane Meadows in 2004.

Shane was premièring Dead Man’s Shoes at the Edinburgh Film Festival and agreed to spend half an hour chatting to me. He also gave me a promo of the film and invited me to a special screening of some of his and Paddy Considine’s short films - all of which is documented in the feature.

You can read the interview (and various Shane bits and pieces) on the Lazarus Corporation website. The article originally appeared in Exposed Magazine.

The music industry may be in a terrible tangle, but grassroots scenes are doing dandy. Here in Sheffield it couldn’t be stronger - there’s a thriving live music scene happening all over the city. It includes a range of genres, from folk to metal, and a range of venues, from impromptu jams in the back rooms of pubs to the gargantuan pop overlords that play the city’s arenas. Everyone you meet here is either in a band, used to be in one or wants to form one.

The scene in Sheffield is helped along by an extremely healthy publishing industry. Along with free magazines such as Toast, Exposed and Now Then, there are numerous online only reviewers who can be found sticking their beaks into all manner of musical matters in the city.

One extremely prominent Sheffield music website is Sloucher, a zine with roots in Mexico but firmly based in the equally vibrant South Yorkshire. Sloucher’s output is mind-bogglingly expansive, and Sloucher representatives can be seen at most gigs in the city - and all of the interesting ones.

All of which is a portly preamble to a couple of music reviews I did for them last month. Nitkowski, a post-rock hardcore trio from London, and Love Among the Mannequins, a grungey, shoegazey, metally band who sing about literature and obscure historical figures. I like ‘em.

On the subject of music, I was sorry to hear that .357 String Band have split up. They’re one of the best thrashgrass bands around, along with Split Lip Rayfield, and their banjoist is astoundingly fast. It all sounds amicable, just a matter of the thing having run its course. I can empathise.

I write oddities for people now and then. I thought I’d put a few of them here, so I can remember I’ve done them.

I’ll start with a very silly poem, called Cocker of Snooks. I got the idea from three things - reading too much James Ellroy, the concept of the ‘outsider’… and someone saying the phrase ‘cocked a snook’ to me in conversation. It stuck in my noggin, so I wrote a poem for The Agoraphobic Reviewer.

Cocker of Snooks

He cocked a snook and yucked a yuck. He bounced in and flounced off. He was full of piss and vinegar. They took him with a pinch of salt and said he had a chip on his shoulder.

They smirked when he got irked and called him a berk. He dug deep and came off shallow. His field of dreams was fallow.

They played ideas tennis and he was the ball-boy. They jammed freeform while he played chopsticks. He fell from grace and lost face. They put him in his place.

And now he’s one of them.

Film Shed posts give me an excuse to indulge in some low-brow film analysis. They focus on the sort of film one shouldn’t spend too much time and energy thinking about.

Hunter’s Blood is one such film. It had a legendary status for me when I was a teenager, partly because the only copy I’d ever seen was a Betamax tape my friend had recorded off the TV. And no-one else ever seemed to have heard of the film. It’s also quite bloody.

In essence it’s a made-for-TV Deliverance clone about city boys stranded in backwoods hillbilly territory. It stars Clu Gulager, Billy Drago, Kim Delaney and Joey Travolta. It also features the first ever screen appearance of Billy Bob Thornton.

The main characters are basically a pastiche of Lewis, Ed, Bobby and Drew (from Deliverance) and it’s the same city arrogance that ends them in trouble with the locals (“These guys look like they’re something out of National Geographic,” one of the city boys observes during an early encounter).

Clu Gulager is a fine B-movie actor, best known for his role in Return of the Living Dead, but more recently seen battling blood-crazed aliens in Feast. His presence in Hunter’s Blood elevates the tale, and he’s believable as the rational, measured Mason Rand. His wardrobe seems to be directly modelled on Hannibal of the The A-Team, appropriately enough as Mason is the man with the plan.

Clu and crew find a clue that it’s their cue to leave… sorry.

The plot is fairly formulaic - a game of cat-and-mouse, following the city boys’ perceived disrespect of the redneck way of life. But the dialogue’s smart, the pace is taut and in places it’s very funny. The action’s solid, despite the low production values, and the suspense builds to a typically bloody finale. The most memorable thing about the film is the way the hillbillies pepper the trail with strategically-placed corpses, giving them an upper hand in the psychological battle against the sensitive city types.

It doesn’t have the apocalyptic vision of John Boorman’s film on which it’s obviously based, but Hunter’s Blood delivers a dose of survival thriller that hits as hard as a Clu Gulager karate chop.

Note: you can watch the whole film on YouTube.