lemon revolution

my blood lost its way rivuletting through sand turning and twisting glimmering red beads slide slowly away from my beaten body sun light falls, plummeting through warm summer air but no breath rings in its shimmering pulse only broken bones and rotten clothes once a city trembled here now gone, simply gone and nothing remains but fits of old sirens the dull thud of a lapping sea and rusted shards of useless keys

ribbons wind over my limbs at midnight a python wakes binds bites and breaks me sleep is an awakening into a nightmare where shrapnel and brick rain in smokey blasts where i see my son again screaming in a broken coffin tears break and drop from the cliff of my bruised cheek soiling these pitiless roads in my despair flames gently waver and kiss, as the sun slowly climbs but even they, these restless stones of my quivering hope look weak and tired before my eyes i wonder will i ever see him again and will i ever kiss those soft gentle lips will i ever close shut my creaking front door will my people ever flee off this blood-soaked moor

I must say, the biggest disappointment of the Etihad gig (Sunday) for me was the fans. I went with a bunch of mates who were all loading up on gear, but as a 22 year-old with the £80 chance to see a band that had soundtracked practically every minute of his last 5 years, such an option felt nothing more than foolish. I just wanted to rejoice with thousands of people to my favourite tunes, to hear a stadium bellow out the songs I had poured over endlessly in my bedroom for so long. Unfortunately, the fans were terrible. The warning signs were set alight when, prior to the Roses coming on stage, a gang of lads nearby started singing "10 german bombers in the air" and "England/Vindaloo". 10 german bombers in the air? At a Roses concert? Did these guys know nothing about Ian Brown? The most disheartening point arrived during Bye Bye Badman. My favourite Roses song, the very embodiment of the debut album's ethos and energy, a tune which rattles and blee...

 1995 - the year Oasis released Morning Glory, and the year before the band really started losing it musically and characteristically: 96 was the Union Jack guitars, and Liam's voice beginning to sound weary and cabbaged at Knebworth, and endless infighting as a product of endless touring and musical friction within the group. At this point, in these interviews, Gallagher appears bewildered by the sheer absurdity of the position he finds himself in - the voice of a working-class band quickly gaining international fame, and simultaneously a convenient hero of elites in the media, entertainment industry and even in government (Gallagher famously visited Downing Street to meet Tony Blair in 97). Some of the questions fired at him surrounding other bands (namely Blur) and the state of British music are so obviously picked from a media agenda he hadn't signed up for, and his black-faced responses point to a man who is trying to work out just what the hell is happening around him....

look back to the clock. 5 to 5. okay. just 5 more minutes. that’s it, one more, one more. okay. well done. keep going. not long now. not long now. 3 minutes. going great. keep peddling. almost there. next please! next please! next please! how are you. would you like a bag. sorry did you want a bag. cash or card. please insert your card. please enter your pin. please remove your card. thanks bye. do you mind just hanging on till this queue dies down a bit? just get the queue down and then you can head off okay? is that alright? you sure? thanks a lot cheers next please! next please! next please! next please! hi. bag? next. hi. bag? did you want a bag. sorry DID YOU WANT A BAG. next. how’s your day been mate? not bad thanks did you want a bag can you put your card in. enter your pin pleaseENTER YOUR FUCKING PIN FOR FUCK’S SAKE YOU’RE WASTING MY TIME YOU PIECE OF SHIT look back to the clock. 5.28pm. nice tap tap tap tap k...

A really good film that I, rather criminally, only saw through a couple of evenings ago. Still need to read the book which Messr Carney assures me is much better. The interview scene was truly golden. The pre-game discussion of the job-jiro is the 21 st century at its finest, a 30-second sketch of the same sentiment echoed by Noel Gallagher in Cigarettes and Alcohol, followed by a quick rush of class A drugs to help prepare for an important meeting – an image as honest to working-class Scotland as it is to the City of London. Spud’s manic gesturing and his brain-spark admission that he only has one fault: perfectionism. Anyone who has ever sat in an interview will no doubt have faced this absurd question (what is your biggest fault) and may well, like Spud and myself, have thrown together a trashcan of platitudes about “trying too hard for the best” and “being a bit tunnel-vision”. The film’s central idea is to explore the character of modern, Weste...

this face big adult shouting at me maybe shocked at me angry black pits are most of this it’s all empty space has he just punched me in the face like a clown with those big plastic ears shooting me down rough scruffy spikes of hair packs of needles out of his skin with the smoke, he like a bear thrashing around in the forest fire his pupils sprung as if hooked to live wire, will this be me one day errupting at a kid fat in my neck grease on my skin steel world cage traps my heart in

screens pictures of footballers and women, images of friday evenings at the bar, drinks clubs beaches dresses and suits, slogans and tags brands logos and tatts, plastered on the subway halls, on the city gates and village walls: a glass curtain warping time and memory and touch to its molten white rage, like bacteria crawling through your flesh and blood in the lonely, dreaming hour, swarming on the precious stones and towers wild wolves through a lost city. your mind is no more. your body is no more. your words are no more and your touch is no more. welcome to the digital age scratching burning and turning with boredom, the newsman is screaming loud and clear to the pipe in your ear which echoes with the drop drop drop of water, slow and not so steady as the basilisk fang hangs but never yet bites, the tigers claw paused yet never strikes, lying there flicking through the endless pages of a book you’ll only start but never finish, page after page after page ...

sitting by the tent as the sun spun wild and great i found the claw of envy be resting on the muddy floor i found the mad knife, blade wedged into a spirit bottle anger rose like a great bonfire, spiralling smoke into the night footstepts drawn in circles and eyes burned by sorrow the barrel had been emptied, the dream stamped dead all that remained was the shell the bleak icy shell frozen, all life stolen from it in its shining hour broken bits of old money sent from one end to the other flung round the fading tube maybe the time was coming to an end and the sun sunk down neath the towers and trees and darkness etched over our time of glee maybe it would never return and maybe we’d never be so free

 Is this film not a brilliant analogy of class-consciousness in the Western world since the 1980s: the individual awakes after a traumatic incident, unable to recall anything but watery memories of the distant past, unable to stitch its steps through the modern world into any coherent narrative or sense? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time? The film undoubtedly develops the post-modern questioning of truth – we can’t even trust our own memories, so how can we claim anything at all to be true? But the plot, which hinges around some untold, practically forgotten accident, something you know is there in touching distance but you just can’t quite grasp, presents to us a pertinent truth of modern society. We do feel as though something is missing. Despite our materials, comfort and money, we have felt as though things don’t quite add up to make us whole. We feel empty, we feel battered, we feel cogs in some grand, faceless machine, but we d...

lions growling fear rings and echoes through the plain sounds carve across the verge in naked horror thoughts spun wild from milky eyes goodness, spirit chimes in starry flashes on the boiling black turf but reptilian fear surfaces again and again and crawls on leaving prints of red anger and at noon slippery and darting to gaps in the earth hiding from the preying sun and waiting to spin an eye into shadow to drown the shoots of conscience in curling madness i know that mine are not mine that my eye talks before it can see and brain screams before it can hear

The shop floor is a faded beehive on this very day: soul after soul crumpled up dead on the smoking heap of prices and tags and codes and notes. Eyes jumping from rock to rock, bed to bed, the gleaming canyons of heaven vomited onto a canvas of shit: oh wool, knitted, draping jumper; oh so crumpled and green and soft, as the ocean round england’s rocky shore. The man had his focus set from the starting whistle, eyes narrowed and hair waxed straight in furious needles. What more could I say to the chap, as he marched through the clicking switching flinching trench: Oi! Fucking move that jumper you prick! Hurry up! Oi! You! You! Move! But in that moment I glimpsed him naked, eyes swiped bright and fresh and live with the burning wires of panic, a crippling shock which sent fear sprinting in a rattle through his every limb and hair. The rope had been tugged and the faceless hand twitched: a tremor in the stakes of a man’s living, the earth only laughing as it...

Taken from a Facebook comment thread... I do like Liam, a lot. He's clearly very insecure, and to cover this up he feels as though he must shout louder than everyone else, and act the hardman. I forgive him for all this though - he was the front face of the biggest band in the world for a nu mber of years in the '90s, and I think that's enough to turn anyone a bit wonky. Furthermore and more importantly Russ, I think that it is his voice which makes the Oasis sound: on the first two albums (the only albums I like), Liam sings with a tenderness, nuance and sadness that belies a far greater emotional range than what he gives off in his interviews. He's a gem to me, and the fact that a guy off a council estate in Burnage who spent his youth knicking bikes and shoplifting can sing the words to Live Forever and Up In the Sky in the way Liam does, for me says all that ever needs to be said about how great a thing art is. Also, Noel. I love the man as eq...

may time unwind its precious vine and throw up a tremor a hiccup of the soft summer air a burn of the daily oil fierce and bright flames lick wild in silent delight oxygen, air turns full and wide and smiles once creased to horror creased to madness creased to wide-eyed hunger return to the song the morning chortle soft and sweet, warm strokes on the cold haze golden flakes etched onto the black flames dance and run blue spark and fury through the joint where time’s fruit dropped to a common earth where beatles crawled an army hand in hand where the setting sun roared in sadness and joy entwined in misery and ecstasy soft grass laughing beneath tip-toeing feet young and old slip and slide meet neath the brief starry shell for what was ours is now gone and what is theirs is the time falling sands ticking into eternity’s bosom and the eye can only grow soft an...

Michael Rosen has written some excellent short posts about this on his blog . He writes about how feelings of elitism are cultivated within grammar schools and I'd say, are cultivated industrially within any school, grammar or not. Every day at primary school we were told who would pass and fail, we were 'placed' in class according to our positions in the tests,  we were told that the 'other' class would all fail,  we developed a sub-culture that feared local famous kids we knew as 'dangerous' (on no basis whatsoever),  we knew that many families had a reward/no reward system (usually a bike) for kids who passed/failed,  and a hundred other signs and gestures and attitudes and rumours. From this passage, you can see how the class divisions within British society are marked into people's minds from a very early age. It's a system which penetrates through to every facet of social life in Britain, where the tone of a conversation be...

at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go check to see that nobody is escaping to desolation row.... .... between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow and nobody has to think too much about desolation row... ....   right now i can't read too good, don't send me no more letters no not unless youre mailin' from, desolation row     

Went to this talk recently with a friend, done up by the guardian - a live showing of their weekly football podcast. I haven't listened to the the podcast for a couple of years. The show discussed football in the sort of drawling, righteous, tautological tone you come across whenever you hear people talking about the game who clearly don't know very much about it. The show also said a lot about The Guardian, and how as an online football paper, it is trying to approach and perceive its audience: 1) The show was so obviously scripted. Jokes told by panel members and the subsequent reactions amongst the panel sounded well-rehearsed and discussed, to the point of being, well, not very funny. The slightest hint of the discussion reaching to an important and insightful depth was swiftly snuffed and stamped out by the alarm-bell flash of this irritating joke-card. The audience was overwhelmingly male and white, and the thrust of the evening appeared to be: let's not take...

This is a true gem of a tune. It’s probably the most poppy song on Second Coming , and I much prefer it to it’s sister song on the album, Ten Storey Love Song. Ten Storey is a good song in its own right, but lacks the lyrical anger and bitterness of the first album’s snake-fanged bite. Ten Storey is also the showcase of the new Ian Brown vocal: a voice which no longer slips and bleeds through the instrumental fabric but, ala Gallagher, tries to roar over and even fight against it. John Squire’s meatier, bold guitar lines demanded a louder, more potent vocal than the soft whispers of Fools Gold, and the smothered wail heard on This Is The One. Instrumentally, The Second Coming songs lacked the loose, almost improvised roll of the first album. There are fewer empty spaces, fewer moments of pure bass and drum and therefore, fewer moments for Brown to intone gently without competing against the lead guitar.  The lyrics on Second Coming were written entir...

stepping across stone and broken shards of rock skin sliced, streaming in blood step wearily across the gloomy plain darkness rises up from the horizon choking on the pale centre of the sky eyes glance around in blank expressions lonely hands tremble as rain howls and slams where money screams and shouts and drives where heads spin mad where the lonely cave breathes frost and ice where the finger holds out in desperate reach where loneliness binds like a snake in the night where your brain is drowned by hammering tide and spirit crunched in the silent bite