Totally studly and macho flyer for the first Tooting Bizarre gig in Croydon, at the Scream Lounge . Vanessa’s excellent Euro-Prog band The K!Nights Of Rad (website/myspace to follow) support.

I received an email from Nicholas Dobson, author of the very fine “Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook” and founding member of the ICS.

I’m building a huge playlist of ICS music, stuff people made with the 20-Song Game, and I’ve been giggling like crazy listening to your “Breakfast Cereal” song - an excellent example of what I like to call the “Instant Observational Songwriting” sub-genre of lodge music . Something very intimately hilarious about that session you did, very classic.

“There’s all these crazy traditions that have sprung up within the psychotic strictures of the 20-Song Game. Like “micro-filler”, which is the maniacal little songs people create to pad out their track list for the way, or the Self Reflexive Song, where the person sings about them self writing songs. Instant Observational Songwriting is like an externalized version of the latter, for those of us that can sing and play an instrument at the same time. I’ve heard lots of examples of IOS, and of course have joyfully produced lots of it myself, but I was having a hard time finding THE godlike example of it. I used one of my songs as an example of micro-filler, and so I definitely needed to find someone else’s song for IOS, so that I wasn’t hogging the glory by having all the educational examples be MY stuff. Hurray!

What could I do but accept? An honour indeed. Thanks to the ICS for some great times and some hilarious music.

:)

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.