It does not matter whether the United Queendom prevails. All that matters is subjugating the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots.
“Those little tykes, they love a fight and they will fight for us, our United Queendom.
They will bow down and believe: they will serve. Serve their country, serve their priest, serve their landlord and serve their Queen, serve the service, serve the laird, the Lord, the God, the god knows what in between.
It does not matter if they wish to leave, for they are tied forever to our sleeve.
They cannot puke, nor piss, nor think without us. They cannot spend, they cannot send. They cannot bend.
For we…are rulers, and what do rulers do? We rule – they taught us that at school.
We have the tanks, we have the troops (though some were slaughtered – oops!)
We have the power and the might
31st December, 2014
It was the year when the sound of eighties synths and vocals swamped in reverb continued unabated, a colour that seems to have been in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic for at least five years. The year when Kate came back and folk swooned while nobody really noticed gems like Withered Hand’s New Gods and Perfect Pussy’s Say Yes To Love. The year when lavish praise was poured over the Parquet Courts album in spite of it being stuffed with direct lifts from the history of post-punk; The Feelies and The Fall especially. When Paulo Nutini attempted to make an enormous soul/pop album and somehow managed to remain utterly charming and brilliant in spite of missing his target by a country mile. When Leonard Cohen, yet again released an album of faultless songs irreparably marred by horrifically cheap production and female backing vocalists who wouldn’t be out of…—More Rants/Slates
29th December, 2013
Here are my tracks of the year, 2013:
Small Plane by Bill Callahan
Black Tambourine by Withered Hand
Avant Gardener by Courtney Barnett
Carry On, Carry On by Edwyn Collins
Deathrays In Disneyland by The Young Aviators
Is It Raining In Your Mouth? by The Fat White Family
Old Toy Trains by Nick Lowe
Stoned and Starving by Parquet Courts —More Rants/Slates
4th October, 2013
WOMEN!!
WOMEN WANTED IN GLASGOW FOR VIDEO SHOOT!!!
Women, I need your help. Next Tuesday (the 8th of October) I will be shooting a video for my next single, I Hate Myself For Loving You. The concept is simple. We want women to write down (on an A2 piece of card we will supply) what they hate most about their current or ex-lovers and be quickly filmed holding this sign up. The messages can be as trivial/silly, tragic/serious as you wish. We are going to try to collar as many folk as we can to do this at the corner of Vinicombe Street and Byres Road (just beside Fopp, where the phone boxes are) from midday on Tuesday. If you have time please come along and be filmed. Your fee, if included in the cut, will be fame and fortune quite possibly leading to…—More Rants/Slates
3rd September, 2013
As the transfer window closes I find myself sitting in the manager’s office, gold Montblanc in hand, staring down at the contract. Good money, top fixture list, decent facilities. I’m told I’ll be up front, regular first team action. The strip’s a bit dodgy but what the hell, I can learn to love denim. I am already familiar with the wide men, Dollimore and Harvie, and have heard good things about the back line of Alston and Soan. Never a fumble from the London based keeper and many a clean sheet logged by the Glasgow-born centre-half.
I hesitate for a moment, weighing up my options. On the one hand I’m happy where I am – a great bunch of lad – but on the other the temptation of the big league is alluring; the passionate crowds and the chance of famous European nights. In the end I think, fuck it,…—More Rants/Slates
19th August, 2013
Out today like a goddamn plague, like a mass escape from the asylum.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/178Q3Tk
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/lowerreaches
Official Shop: http://shop.Justincurrie.Com —More Rants/Slates
18th August, 2013
I’ll be selling my ass on Thursday at HMV, Buchanan Street in Glasgow at half past five. I’ll be selling my ass all day. Come along and try to buy my ass.—More Rants/Slates
17th August, 2013
On with Tezza, 11am Radio 2, Sunday 18th singing live with Stu—More Rants/Slates
12th August, 2013
For I shall be a-whoring, next Thursday the 22nd at HMV, Buchanan St, Glasgow. Singing and signing on the week of record release. Not many tunes but who knows? Starts at 5:30
Know one thing…I’m not signing debit card receipts or having my photograph taken with anyone called Sharon, Cedric or Arthur. —More Rants/Slates
Can you see what this sort of thing might lead to?—More Rants/Slates
8th August, 2013
This charming man, Gregory Lauder-Frost, vice-president of the Traditional Britain Group believes that Doreen Lawrence is “without merit”.
I believe he may be “without marbles”.—More Rants/Slates
9th July, 2013
My show at Hyde Park this Friday is now free due to Elton John having to pull out of the headline slot through illness. If you have a valid ticket you’ll get a refund and if you don’t you can go here:
http://barclaycardbritishsummertime.frontgatetickets.com/choose.php?c=1&lid=82105&eid=92487&prepasscode=bst
and get a FREE ticket.
You get Ray Davies, Elvis Costello and the wonderful Nick Lowe for nothing in a lovely park in central London in great weather so if you’re not doing anything come on down. I’m on around three on a side stage. Call me Sideshow Bob. Call me cheap, desperate, call me what you will. It’s free. —More Rants/Slates
8th July, 2013
There seems to have been a lot of confusion and bad blood stirred up by the strange sight of Alex Salmond attempting to raise the Scottish saltire behind David Cameron’s beetroot little head in the posh seats of Centre Court after Andy Murray’s victory in the men’s final at Wimbledon (I’ll never tire of saying that).
When I mentioned that I thought it was “cheeky” I was immediately lambasted by nationalists (presumably) who asserted that there is nothing mischievous about a national leader holding the national flag in celebration of one of the nation’s sons’ successes. I understand their point but I feel the need to explore this a little further.
Was Salmond’s act akin to, say, the South African premier waving a national flag after seeing a fellow countrywoman winning an Olympic gold medal? Or Angela Merkel holding a little German flag on a stick after her country’s football team…—More Rants/Slates
27th June, 2013
Yesterday the United Kingdom parliament reached a narrow consensus on the only sensible fiscal path one’s country should take in the teeth of capitalism’s current and most urgent crisis: Blame the poor, tax the poor and disenfranchise the poor. From these three fundamental tenets there shall rise the Phoenix of growth from the ashes of a failed system. And growth there shall be. Growth (exponentially) of the difference between the upper tier of society and everything else. Growth of that tier’s interests being privileged and protected above all others. And the consequent growth of civil unrest whose suppression becomes a self-evident necessity in order to maintain security. Security to perpetuate a system based upon the enslavement of the vast majority of human beings* within it. Security that guarantees the safe passage of wealth between the entrenched-enriched: passage certified and paid for by the rest of us.
Of course the…—More Rants/Slates
Apologies! A whole tranche of people’s wedding shots that were sent to Ignition got fouled up in my spam folder and I only just discovered them . So thanks and sorry they weren’t available for selection to:
Martyn Fuller
Chic Ramsay
Jill Copeman
Christine Alexander
Stephanie Christianson
Emily Walters
Ann Marston
Julie Russell
Susanne Martin
George Monaghan
Jill Rodger
Tony
Tim Berridge
Cristina Gallego—More Rants/Slates
31st May, 2013
John Lydon
Stanley Spencer
The Welsh language
They rhyme garage with disparage and Farage with mirage
Barbara Castle
The subtle art of self-deprecation
They hired a socialist to produce the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games
John Cooper Clarke
Philip Larkin
Tottenham Hotspur
The New Forest
Roots Manuva
The Wombles
The inexorable excising of racism and homophobia simply on the grounds of decency
The Beatles
I’ll say it again: The Beatles
Tommy Cooper
Basil Brush
The Royal Shakespeare Company
Charles Darwin
Crass
The Poll Tax Riots
Eric Hobsbawm
Jane Austen
The Streets
Billy Connolly
Alfred Hitchcock
Elgar
Rachel Whiteread
Postcard Records
The absence of the death penalty
Bittersweet Symphony
TV Go Home
Graham Linehan
The NME
Rat Scabies
Nick Lowe
Yorkshire
The Independent Empire of London
The implicit understanding that morris dancers are pocket fascists
Geniuses at making fun of the Germans
Anthony Burgess
Arial by Kate Bush
Stuart Lee
Vivian Westwood
Steve McQueen
Eric Morecambe
The Smallpox vaccine
Guy Fawkes Night
The Pogues
The National Theatre
Crick & Watson
Shane Meadows
The Battle of Britain
Bobby Moore
Amy Winehouse
The BBC
The Midlands
The Shipping Forecast
Scotland—More Rants/Slates
28th May, 2013
Thanks to everyone who sent me old wedding photos, they’re brilliant. I can’t use every one so don’t be offended if your family don’t make the cut. Your efforts are much appreciated. And those of you who tried to sneak in your own wedding by de-saturating the shots and judiciously cropping out any modern outfits – I’m not falling for it. Nice try…Cheers! JC—More Rants/Slates
Fiends, fellow heirs and inciters. I am making a little video for a track from my forthcoming album, Lower Reaches, to be offered as a free download in a marketing and promotional blitz the likes of which has not been seen since the privatisation of the gas board. I need wedding photos. I need OLD wedding photos – your grandparents or your parents – nothing too modern. I need dance floor scenes and group shots, confetti flinging and ribboned limos. I need pictures of folk taking pictures and I need smiles and veils and trains and hats. All and any aspects of weddings for a slow, romantic piece of music.
You’ll need to warrant that you own the images and are happy to have me use them in a music video so don’t send me something that somebody else wouldn’t want to see on YouTube. This is why wedding photos of…—More Rants/Slates
20th May, 2013
I am proud of Scotland. Proud of the fact that we are an experimental human repository for the study of cancer and heart and liver disease. Proud that our largest city harbours a festering internecine hatred nurtured by the segregation of our children in an education system dominated by religion. Proud of our illustrious history of merrily sending young flesh to be maimed and slaughtered in grubby little occupations sought by the British Empire to further its nefarious aims. Proud that triage surgeons have been sent here to train in our ritual orgy of Saturday night stabbings. Proud that we can’t get a tram to run down our capital’s high street, but successfully demolished our great 19th century housing stock to barrack the working class in dormitory sink estates awash with chronic addiction and preventable disease. Proud of our financial institutions, bastions of Presbyterian prudence, who followed the flood of…—More Rants/Slates
11th September, 2012
For all the moaning minnie Scots who have been telling me the man’s a wimp, a choker, has no guts , no stamina and will never win a Slam.
You were wrong.
We are now open for business.
You’re wonderful, Mr. Murray.—More Rants/Slates
17th August, 2012
If singing thirty seconds of a song in a church is hooliganism motivated by religious hatred then what the fuck is a hymnary other than a list of specific terrorist instructions? Go forth and multiply and do God’s work. By the way, He fucking HATES Jews, Muslims, Fags and Philistines, OK? He just likes a bit of order, you know? No fuss, everyone the same, knowing their place, worshiping whatever keeps them happy. Off you go, defend the faith. You might need one of these – an AK47 or a judicial system with unchecked power operating in the interest of a secret state.—More Rants/Slates
5th April, 2012
Still missed by all who witnessed his crazy fistfights with the air.—More Rants/Slates
2nd March, 2012
It was announced earlier today that the world, hitherto assumed to be royally knackered, is in fact going to shit in a shopping trolley. And now over to Steve for the sport.—More Rants/Slates
1st March, 2012
Birdshit
A more ponderous, pretentious and ultimately vapid drama is hard to imagine unless one dared contemplate an adaptation of Barbara Cartland’s “Love Under Fire” directed by Tony Scott and starring, say, that little pillock from Muse.
Nothing in this lavishly ill-conceived dross was even remotely credible. The enigmatically mumbled dialogue was vacuous, the performances monstrously vain, the direction risibly portentous and criminally derivative. Even the score was crass, repetitive and smug.
Essentially a non-stop sequence of face-achingly drawn out close-ups of a freckly shampoo model with girly lips, the whole production resembled an absurd three hour advert for some dreadful bottled stench called, perhaps, Trenchfoot (by Givenchy). In its desperation to milk cheap reactions from the TV audience, Birdsong played every low trick in the manual – gore, guts and cardboard heroics cut with bucolic idylls shot through diaphanous silks and wafting foliage – resulting in nothing less than hardcore emotional pornography.…—More Rants/Slates
6th August, 2011
A lopsided frantic drumbeat followed by a hurried fill brings in a strange flapping scalene bass melody. It comes seemingly from a brooding sky. A guitar cuts in, arpeggiating on two strings in a dumb angular primitive way. The voice starts, a crooner in some dripping concrete basement intoning news of a cataclysm. Things are crashing, or at least racing into chaos. It is already frightening. Family pets are distressed, you don’t really like this dim, echoing cathedral of disquiet.
But you venture further in and though things warp, slow down – the atmosphere of doom is relentless. The metal guitar alternates between melody, crunch and a sort of ratcheting, like something with steel teeth being cranked. There are hints of narrative – empty cars, everything abandoned: where will it end? The singer modulates up an octave. He seems desperately scared. Is this entertainment?
The drums are in the wrong room, it’s…—More Rants/Slates
Is this a carnival or a retirement home for mad veterans? Why are we in this theatre and why are the rich folk laughing. Is something funny?
You slide into a choir of Jack-the-Lads, get jostled by their bonhomie before being set adrift on a glass sea. You float until thumped by a comedy boxing glove. Images crowd around you, people sail past on the green banks of a slow brown river, grinning like masks. It is heaven perhaps, but you doubt it. You are spiked on the stab of a chiming guitar – dit – dit – dit…Everyone is smiling sarcastically, the bass guitar huffs like a grumpy rag-and-bone man. There is a strong echo of vaudeville but it is overlaid with a savage modernism. Fuzz-tones, cockney warbling, somnambulant drumming and Victoriana. You get thrown from room to room – these people are schizophrenic, their songs face one another like…—More Rants/Slates
14th April, 2010
You can hear them breathing before the delicacy lifts onto the air. Twinned and entwined, the two guitars dance around one another as human voices drone and intone biblical motifs, cuss words and longing – longing is the word. The opening number dies like bathwater draining down and segues into swamp banjo blues. This is all very live. We are stretched somewhere between The Stones and 1768. Thick swathes of forest and peeling wooden church-houses, a keening call from the past, a brilliant deception: dressed in civil war clothes, singing an acidic parody of sepia sentiment, weird modern wolves breathe vodka fury under the sacrificial lambswool.
The ballads break hearts and are filled with devastated mystery. They operate on the mind like photographs from an unreachable dream. Scenes from the small town rock and roll circuit speak of unfathomable sadness. Ruination and emptiness call from the souls of regular folks; immigrants,…—More Rants/Slates
10th March, 2010
Chime, chime, chime. A swirl of harmonies, maximum compression – I am stoned in this slow whirlpool of crunching gravel. Electric guitar cream. Wah, Aah, Ba-pa-pah…
Non-stop pop. Chugging: dum dum dum – drang drang drang. Lovers’ songs, leavers’ longing, pain and needing – she’s back again, your heart is bleeding.
Strumming and picking, the ocean’s lapping and the stars’ blinking. Electric guitars built in a bank of colour. Words sewn into streaming tunes flutter like ribbons. This truck is tuned and humming, growling, gunning.
Riffs write themselves on the air like titanium ticker-tape, chords plunge and swoop. The rhythm section lays a lazy line under all this sunshine. I stagger from song to song sticky with nectar. I am happy.
Can I hear a doubt in these sweet intimations of love, or feel a discouraging breeze? In all this pretty chiming can I hear a sour bell call from the darkness?
Is your love…—More Rants/Slates
5th March, 2010
A single snare beat in its spring reverb halo hits and the whole world comes tumbling in. A waterfall of wires, a mass of roots seeking something in the soil. He is callous, weary and unforgiving, a bitter agent sent here to do somebody’s dirty work. He is here to give the folk some news: You’re nothing, so rot in hell.
He sings across the sky like a heretic in a minaret. The band can barely contain the anarchy, they talk over one another like a table of drunks. They fight like cats to break through the jungle of sirens in the sound. The voice weaves between them like a rope of disgust in a barrel of snakes. Whistles blow, absurd postcards are thrown in your face. You are hustled down hallways and dragged into doors to be presented with the grotesque like specimens in a gallery of the damned. Laughter…—More Rants/Slates
18th January, 2010
It is sunny – very sunny. An acoustic guitar gallops like an eager horse. You hear everything clearly – the air is white, the ground is cream. The world is clean and it sparkles in a beautiful cool morning. Perhaps you have been awake all night. Everything is good.
You quickly slow down. The rhythm section clocks the singer like a mechanical doll. The voice is strung on the beat like a diaphanous summer dress. The air of melancholy is so sweet as to make you stoned. So much pleasure in such easy pain.
Folk-picking circles around a pretty motif. A new voice undermines its whimsicality with hints of unhappiness. You are pushed into a show-tune. There could be a chorus line, a can-can and glitter covered top-hats. These are up people for an up time. The overarching flavour is smooth. You begin to feel a little nauseous.
The clinical positivity continues but…—More Rants/Slates
18th December, 2005
There is piss and vomit upon the ground, deep and crisp and even, in some places dusted with polystyrene snow. There are restive plugs of shoppers, close to riot crammed into retail entrances like human stuffing. The pubs are full of an unusual sort of idiot, the one who has spent everything he has on those that he loathes and is now taking revenge on his own body with a cocktail of beverages so ill suited that just two in a small bowl would kill a dog.
There are hugs for hated underlings and kisses for the normally ignored from a tosser in the top job who’s vibrating already in expectation of the vile powders his sneering assistant has gone to fetch. Soon he shall be selecting his coterie of cokers for the night and sensing a new omnipotence; the kids’ schools paid up for another year, the villa held for…—More Rants/Slates
