Weirdly continuing the nautical theme from last year’s flyers, Tooting Bizarre is now in it’s third year (I think) at the The Miller.

A sad day indeed, but it will soon be time for me to leave the band I have committed creative juices to since late 2004. That’s five years, three albums, three music videos, one single, half-a-gazillion demos and 54 gigs!

So the new Thumpermonkey record finally got finished. It is entitled “We Bake Her Bread Beneath Her Holy Fire“. Here is the artwork that I prepared for it. The look I was aiming for is bold and striking - an attempt at a classy and “iconic” feel (whatever that means!). The bird-headed woman speaks to the Aztec imagery that Mike Woodman enjoys so much, the birds are a nod to HP Lovecraft’s soul-snatching whippoorwills (as mentioned in Whateley, track 2), and the toaster is, well, an incredible looking toaster (and matched to the imagery in Proktor Cylex, track 4).

I have re-built the Thumpermonkey site in Drupal. Tthe site is now entirely dynamic and super-easy to keep up to date by any of the guys in the band. This is good because (a) we have a bunch of gigs coming up and (b) I’m leaving Thumpermonkey at the end of the year, so I can hand over the admin of the site to the rest of the guys knowing that the site will always look fresh and alive.

Olid in the studio recording their first self-titled EP with Umair Chaundry at Keynote Studios, Reading. Shot on Vanessa’s new little Flip Video doodad.

Yes. It is here. Four tracks of molten gloom recording at Keynote Studios in Reading. Half the recording was paid for by Nightshift Magazine, Oxford, after they awarded 50ft Panda with Demo of the Month, and the engineer, Umair Chaundry, got an absolutely blinding sound for the record. I truly free the bar has been lifted again - this is definitely the best sounding record I’ve ever been part of.

Please download Olid, by Olid for free (at 320kbps mp3) from TootingBizarre.org, our free netlabel.

Whilst I was recording my parts for the upcoming Thumpermonkey album, Ben Wren shot a little video on his new camera, and I look reasonably well dressed in it. Here, more to feed my personal obsession for self-archiving than anything else, is the session from December 2009.