Desvergüenza

Thor's Helmet has returned to the revolting confines of our rehearsal space a couple of times now, and I can confidently say that I am delighted by the results so far. The level of wrongness achieved at the last session was pretty impressive to say the least. We resurrected what is possibly our most unacceptable song, the deeply sleazy blues Snakeskin Woman, a track which, shall we say, pushes the boundaries of taste both lyrically and musically. It's basically the bastard offspring of Elmore James and hardcore porn smothered in a fucking ton of sludge and slurry which I fucking adore playing because I get to flex my bottleneck muscles in a manner I don't get to very often, because much as I fucking love blues, most people who play it are nothing but copyists and purists so far up their own arseholes that they start to resemble human Klein bottles, who completely lack any sense of fucking humour and totally fail to understand the idea of originality.

It's a fucking rare joy just to let rip with the slide with no regard for taste or decency whilst Garuda bellows his fucking head off with some of the most downright disgusting lyrics this side of Whitehouse, plus it acts as a nice bridge between the twin epics that bookend the set; the ever-ascending Chromeish motorik lunacy of Lay, and TH's signature outrage, Epsilon In Malachandrian Red, half an hour of cosmic ranting, ultradoom and spacerock insanity that never fails to make jaws drop due to the utter shamelessness it radiates like a newly born star, as it gives us a chance to relax a little and regroup before EIMR, which is a fairly intense piece to play, to say the least, and we'd probably all have heart attacks if we had to go straight into that fucker after Lay.

And speaking of Lay, that song sounds so fucking strong compared to when we used to play it, especially after I rewrote the main riff and now that Indrid's bass is augmented with enough effects and fuzz monstrousness to be on an equal footing with my wall of cosmic death guitar, the fucker's sounding like a hideous cross between Jack Bruce in fuzz loon mode and Lemmy/Duncan Sanderson at their crankiest, and there can be no higher praise from me for a bassist in this context. As Donald "Duck" Dunn would say, we got a band powerful enough to turn goat's piss into gasoline, and I reckon two more rehearsals like this and we'll be setting the dates for the live shit, and all I'm going to say is we've got some ideas for films, backdrops etc. that if we can pull 'em off (matron) will match the music in terms of utter galactic foolishness. Oh, and if y're really, really (un)lucky, we'll do Tales Of Brave Ulysses with me on vocals. I can't fucking wait...

*When I say blues, I mean real fucking blues, not the fucking White Stripes.

Jadeante

To quote DJO's version of Jean-Luc Picard, my head feels like it's been shat through a wormhole and fucked by a balrog. In the best possible way. My brain is still in a very comfy bed and is resolutely refusing to co-operate until it's been fed with copious amounts of good fucking coffee, so this is probably going to get a bit random. Maybe James Cotton (acid house bloke as opposed to the bluesman) isn't necessarily the most sensible music to be listening to under these circumstances, but hell, it feels right so fuck it.

And things are feeling right at the moment, in a way that they haven't for a fair whack of time, because I've finally stopped thinking and started fucking doing, and in the process discovered that all my friends were right and I was wrong, that I'm not the social retard with a permanent black cloud hovering over his head I've sometimes thought I was, and I've finally broken that fucking feedback loop of shitty thinking and negative self-analysis that has defeated me in the past. In short, I am no longer a twat.

I'm also smoking less, and not just because the quality of hash in London has increased by a remarkable degree in the last few months or so, but because getting stoned is fucking great, but you can go too far, and when the only points in your day when y're not a shambling smokebeast are work and sleep, you've gone too far, and I was chainsmoking constantly the second I got through the door during the week and as soon as I was awake at the weekends, almost to the exclusion of any other, more stimulating activities, like actually getting off the fucking sofa. So now I smoke because I enjoy it, as opposed to using it as a crutch and basically self-medicating myself out of the conscious world, a place I've discovered I like a whole lot more than I thought now I'm not invariably experiencing it through fogged and distorted lenses.

And it's fucking fantastic. I've laughed more in the last month than in the 12 which preceded it, rediscovered the joy of just being with good people, rekindled friendships that were dormant from neglect and petty stuff that really didn't mean shit. I no longer have the constant, idiotic background paranoia that I'm behaving like an arsehole and people are just putting up with me, which I always knew was fucking stupid, because my friends are generally not the sort of people who would refrain from telling me I'm being a cunt when I am, which is just one of the many reasons I love 'em all to death.

I'm so grateful to the support of the people around me, their unswerving fucking brilliance in knowing what to say, and what not to say, for listening to all of my crap, for putting up with my unreliability* and my erratic behaviour and moods and having faith in me when, frankly, my well had run dry. In that respect I'm one lucky fucker, and there's no way on fucking earth I'd be writing this if it wasn't for them.

So I have a life again, and it's one I love, and it's so fucking inspiring. Music and words and ideas are just leaking out of my pores, I'm pulling new riffs, sounds and songs from the air like a demented butterfly collector. Thor's Helmet is sounding fucking immense, a much meaner, nastier proposition than ever before, a roaring fucking spacerock fuelled doom machine with a glint in it's eye and a really dirty mind, lyrics so shameless they'd make Dave Wyndorf blush and no sense of dignity whatsoever. Think Angels In Pigtails-era Terminal Cheesecake fistfucking Black Sabbath with a massive side order of (early) Hawkwind and Chrome.

There'll be new Morgen und Nite stuff coming soon too, two of the flat out weirdest pieces of music we've ever recorded, which I'm saying nothing about until they're both completely done, except that if you listen on headphones to one of the tracks it actually makes you feel dizzy and vaguely nauseous, and which, now I'm actually off my arse and doing shit, will be released by some as yet unsuspecting record label on heavy fucking vinyl because I won't sleep until it happens. And I'm almost done with two, yes two, solo recordings. One all guitar, one techno with a big slab of gooey acid house stirred in, but more on those soon. Oh, I almost forgot to mention The Electric Bacons. So now I have**.

The biggest thing for me though, is being able to go out, to actually want to go out, the fact that I'm genuinely socially confident for probably the first time in my life, that the fear, the anxiety around people has dissipated, the shocking revelation that I can actually talk to someone I've never clapped eyes on before without having to be off my face on something or other and without wanting to run and hide, let alone contemplate the idea that that person might find me interesting or even (shock, horror) attractive. I may sound like a bit of a dick here, but I couldn't give a toss, because if it wasn't for these changes in me, then I wouldn't be sitting here with a head full of amazing possibilities, and an idiot grin on my face you'd need an angle grinder to remove, and the reason for said grin would never have entered my life.

*Some of which (but not all) can be put down to a vicious autoimmune condition called Guillain–Barré Syndrome which almost killed me three years ago. And yes, I know, I haven't mentioned that before. Just too fucking raw. I never wrote about it because it was fucking terrifying, and every time I tried found that words were just inadequate to express what it was like. Still do, I'm just infinitely better at dealing with it, and the consequences of it now.

**Soon the world will bear witness to the porcine garage glory. And it won't be best pleased.

El Horror...

We're back. Again. It seems our notoriety has increased in our absence, and our nation's scrumpy reserves have finally reached a level able to sustain the space-rockin' beast that is Thor's Helmet once more. I've dusted down and oiled the 7-string. The Book Of Ylem has been opened for the third time and it's forbidden knowledge will once again seep into the world's unconscious. Get ready, because things are gonna get messy.

All Hail Malachandria!