i-want-more

Personality crisis

Soundtrack: the new Arcade Fire and Grinderman releases

The Arcade Fire still leave me cold. It's not for want of trying, they've been jumping around me like a bloody giddy terrier for two years or so now, and I wish they'd leave it out. The Grinderman album is alright, but it is a well-worn path I think, it sounds consciously like a return to the old Bad Seeds template - which is no bad thing in a way. Then again, it is 2007...

Another weekend full of painting, and we are beginning to resent each other as much as our flat. The work seems never-ending and the chaos we're living in just seems to worsen daily. This is a low, as a once-good English band once used to say.

BBC4 is currently running a New York Week, which is great - they are showing a lot of documentaties about the music that has come out of the city in particular. On Friday evening I watched New York Doll, about the New York Dolls' bassist Arthur 'Killer' Kane, and I wept like a baby. The man saw his dream of the Dolls reuniting and playing a gig come true, then he died a few days later of leukemia. I remember being in the Royal Festival Hall bar on the night of the gig to meet with Mr Weaver and Nige, and it was like there had been a clarion call to all the freaks in Europe (and Jonathan Ross). Wish I'd seen the gig now.

Have also caught a bizarre Arena documentary about the Chelsea Hotel, complete with appearances from Warhol, Burroughs, Jobriath and Nico (the latter honking away like a Teutonic car alarm on a version of 'Chelsea Girls'). All this is making me salivate for the Big Apple all the more. For those of you whom I haven't already bored to death with it, I'm off there in about three weeks.

I can't wait to get out of this country.

posted by deafdisco @ 5:16 pm