His Royal Highness the Prince of Cuddles

So there we were, Steve, Matt, Ken and myself were coming home from the Hobbit one warm May evening after a light celebration of Steve's birthday. As we were completing the inevitable crawl back to me and Matt's house for inevitable after pub drinks (Steve got wine from people for his birthday) we stopped suddenly. It appears Steve had kicked something in the face. Matt bent down and saw that it was a stag beetle.

The stag beetle was taken home with it's fork like feet firmly attached to Matt's hands and was thereby dubbed His Royal Highness the Prince of Cuddles in the memory of our yet to be purchased ferrets. Seemingly unresponse to most form of stimuli, incense smoke seemed to be the only thing that perked him up. Since none of us were coleopterists, we had no idea if this was a good or bad thing.

He was kept for a day or two in a pint glass stuffed full of lettuce, figuring him to be a herbivore. He promptly escaped leaving the lettuce untouched. Luckily Matt found him close to his tiny see-through prison and we decided that it would be best for him to let him go. After taking lots of photos.

We'll miss you HRH...
- Mike

P.S. We don't know whether it was because Steve kicked him in the face or whether stag beetles are just shit, but his pincers were rubbish, causing no feeling in the fingers other than a light pinch.

Daytime TV

So there we were watching the most drab and mundane television possible, when the idea of owning a pet came to mind. After brief discussions with house mates, it's possible that we here in Southampton may be getting a ferret or two. This has two benefits:

a) We get to freak people out by not telling them we have any pets and then when they say things like "hey, did anyone hear anything?" we respond nonchalantly with such phases as "oh, you're probably imagining things". Then we get the ferrets to be naturally curious about ankles and boom! Pranks akimbo.

b) We no longer have to pick up any food that we drop.

There is a problem, however, with what to name them. After much deliberation, my housemate Matt came up with the best two:

a) Colonel Marmalade

b) His Royal Highness the Prince of Cuddles

Basically, I'm asking if anyone else can think of anything better.
- Mike

So...

Boris Johnson is Mayor of London.


Boris...

...Johnson.

Boris "Section 28" Johnson.

Has the country gone utterly mental? I can only assume that the country has gone utterly mental.

I only wanted Mario Kart

On Tuesday, my mate dug out the N64 which, after but a few minutes, gave me a hankering for some Mario Kart. Dan and I immediately went out to try and find a copy of Mario Kart satiate this craving. This was about two in the afternoon.

I awoke hungover Wednesday morning, in Bristol, with a crowd of strangers.

I don't live in Bristol. I don't know strangers.

I did not get Mario Kart.

-Chris

Christmas Room

Ok, so we've been a little lax lately as to updating our "at least once a week" blog, but with good reason. On Saturday we all crammed ourselves into the festively titled "Christmas Room" at Matt's house and played our little acoustic hearts out to a few friends and family. Don't worry, we're not just nice guys who do nice things to the people who help us out, we actually had an ulterior motive.

We played our acoustic set to our trusted sound engineers Aled and Matt "the Sound" in order for them to record us. In the mixing stage as we speak, the live acoustic album which is yet to be titled will soon be able to be bought from gigs.

It was a peculiar experience. Cameras at every angle, including one IR camera that made everyone's hair look grey, were surprisingly easy to get used to. We started rolling and the pressure was on. We took a while to get swinging, but once we did, we accidently started having fun. The energy of the later songs is apparently something to behold and which I personally look forward to after only the preliminary mixes played through tiny speakers to go on.

A video is also being editted by a kind gentleman I was not introduced to, hopefully one of the band will reply with all the necessary props he's due. No idea when he'll be done since he's doing it in his spare time, but this means the next few updates will probably have some footage snippets from the event, so keep checking back.

Stay festive,
- Mike

Spot the deliberate mistakes

Macca and Matt told me all about some excellent japanese band we were listening to in my car on the way to the Leytonstone gig, who apparently sit down immediately after every gig and watch a video of the whole performance in order to learn how to do it better next time. Who are they again? Can't remember...they wear matching visors, I seem to remember...

We prefer to try and get good BEFORE we play, but in this particular case (since for whatever reason the gig was a bit shambolic) I think a breakdown of this video someone posted onto our myspace page would at least be a good way to piss off the rest of the band:




1) Inexplicable northen accent on my part

2) I'm sharp by maybe as much as a third when the guitars come in

3) Sophie's flat as a pancake when she comes in

4) Mike's got flowers all over his mic stand - what a gay

5) Matt 'never learnt the melody'

6) Macca and i don't come in together for the last verse

Any more? Andy's laughing at the end, and it makes me suspicious... We'll have none of this 'merriment' thank you very much...

-Alex

Easter and all that.

Hello,

no video this update, but I figured one should happen since it has been more than a week since the last. I presume you're doing well?

This week a lot of the band have been involved in various studious activities. For some of us it's the final year of our uni course, which involves the mad rush of finishing our dissertations before the end of April. Luckily we have a shed load of gigs in April so we're trying to finish as much as we can now. This means that unlike we planned, we have neither recorded anything, nor written many new songs.

Not to worry, I'm sure everyone's coming up with new material on their own, but all I can think about is the Neverhood.

Better luck next time,
- Mike

Something a little bit different:

Enjoy! It's another little bit of my actual degree gone forever...

You may notice there isn't any footage from either of the actual gigs we played this weekend. Correct.

-Alex

The Three Guineas on St. Paddy's day

Last night was a first timer for Smokey Bastard - we actually played in an Irish Bar. For the first of the two St. Paddy's day gigs this weekend, we took on the Three Guineas- the pub on the Reading station platform.

A 14 hr day

After a heavy seven hours of rehearsing both old and very new tunes, burning pizzas, watching rugby and generally fart arsing about, the Smokey Bastard train headed on over to the Three Guineas, where in true style we caused havoc to all those in our path and managed to block off the majority of the bus park outside the station for a good 20 minutes. By 8.45, and with a good crowd in front of us, we were ready to go - but our 'working day' was to last for many more hours!

Set and Match

With both Wales and England victorious in the rugby and the irish with a saint to celebrate, the evening was set to be one of celebration. Our first set started with Mrs McGrath, and was an almost entirely acoustic spasm; the crowd were in good form, and much jigging, singing, falling over and guiness drinking was had by all.

The second set saw a somewhat large increase increase in volume as we played through a noisy punk set, which we thoroughly enjoyed. By this point the audience were generally getting more wobbly- the floor became strewn with a few drunken casualties who'd jigged just that bit too far. [Ivo has ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE OF RHYTHM - Alex]

Mais oui, ma mère est dans l'arbre

By half 10 it was all over, after an encore of Mrs McGrath and Steve the Twat. An hour or so and a whole lot of free Guiness later we finally left the Three Guineas and headed back over to the Ness family care home, where further drinking and merriment was had around the burning stove out in the wonderfully atmospheric christmas...shed...

Most notably, a large portion of the evening was carried out in completely nonsense french, while we ate hot buttered crossed buns and put the world right on our terms. Drunken, tired, contented terms at that.

En plus...

Two more days of rehearsing and then a Leytonstone gig - here we come!

-Sophie [with interfering by Alex...]

"Go Long!"

"I Am Long..."


Working backwards from the joint premises that:

• we all have a strong primal urge to throw whatever we've got to anyone who holds up their hands half cupped together in the cross-cultural sign for 'pass it here!'

and

• when throwing things it's obligatory to shout 'go long' on the offchance that the catcher will retort 'I am long', facilitating everybody's feeling rather smugly witty,

we at Bastard have calculated that shouting "I am long!" obliges anyone in the area to throw to/at the shouter whatever object they can fastest throw in his/her direction.

This has turned out to be really useful if someone's holding something you want, since they'll usually end up throwing whatever's in their paws already, even if they don't particularly want to give it up. Also handy if you're feeling cruel and someone is holding something like a slice of their favouritest cake in the whole world (and you feel ready to dodge it).

Just so that I can feel I've covered all the bases, I should say please don't attempt to take advantage of this if you're sat in a particularly large crowd on a pebbly beach, or similar - we've already had some fairly serious biscuit incidents and wouldn't want you to get caught out like we were.

(Better than dubious social commentary, right?)

-Alex

Nefarious Various

I am a music man/
I come from far away/
And I can play./
What can you play?/
I play the Gee-tar.

Last weekend, during songwriting, it became clear that Matt couldn't play a scale from a given note ("I've never needed to, shut up!" etc.).

He kept trying, while everyone around him yelled "TONE TONE SEMITONE TONE TONE TONE SEMITONE" in increasingly incomprehensible tones of exasperation and spit-flecked rage, but he was basically trying to do it chromatically no matter what we screamed and jabbered at his perplexed little eyebrows.

Finally, exhausted from such eye-rolling, slavering apoplexy, the band quietened down enough to offer some resignedly damage-limitating advice: "look Matt, it's really not very often a semitone. If in doubt, assume it's not a semitone."

A pause.

"If in doubt, skip a fret, don't just go up to the next one", comes the hopeful rephrase.

*matt looks frantically at the low E string he's playing the scale on*

"skip a fret?" (he looks up, petrified) "I'm going to run out!"

[Cue aploplectic jabbering part II.]

Gigs

As the academic year moves into it's final stages and the days begin to lengthen into evenings, our schedule is happily beginning to get more busy again. At the moment it's still not much but there are already one or two dates not quite up there yet, including the intriguing notion that we might play at the opening of a 'community garden squat project' organised by some punks in Reading.

Make Punk, not war

This brings me to something bastard have been talking about for a while: I don't care what they say, punks under the age of about 25 are all just hippies with leather jackets and slightly less girly hair.

"Community garden squat project"?! Since when did punks do that? What happened to "shit on the community, it's a cunt"? That's what I'd like to know.

I suppose in honesty it's a good thing that punks havn't given up the aesthetics of their movement (the clothes, the music, the politicism) and have started to care about the environment and are nice to their mummies as well (we're nice to our mummies).

But punks are basically a remnant of a previous generation, and it's heartbreaking but I recon - uhoh, controversial statement - that chavs are the only original 00's subversive youth culture. Wanky, but true, kids. We've got about two years to sort this out before this was the decade of chavs and emo. Time for:

A folk uprising!
Lock up your maidens and get out the battle hoe, this fair country will jig to a new tune...

To whom it may concern,

So, another week, another song writing session for Smokey Bastard. The whole band were here for this one, although it appears we could only have a full house on the condition that someone was ill, and thus incapable of being any use. Andy drew the short straw, resulting in mumbled groaning and legions of vomit. Despite many snack breaks, impromptu gigs and at least one person setting their head on fire, productivity ensued and we now have three shiny new songs that no one has heard.

The "printing" of the new EP is also complete, and you can buy it at any of our gigs for the tiny sum of one English pound sterling (£1). It contains four songs, which you can sample on our Myspace, and these limited edition prints contain pieces of paper that were all physically touched by various members of the band. You can smell the soothing stench of folk. Don't worry though, Andy wasn't allowed anywhere near them.

As for any surprise announcements, I get the feeling that they're going to be delayed by at least a week. If anyone can hold their breath that long I will be more than impressed.

Yours incoherently,
- Mike

Hey Y'all

It's my fucking birthday. Suck on that, bitches.

Chris

Just a Bad Dream

Good Morning, Good Morning

I feel the need to share with you all a touching yarn.

John is the landlord at The Royal Oak; my local in Bath. A few months back he approached us about playing a folk festival, which we said we probably would.

To my surprise, when I went to The Oak I was approached by John's wife who is organising said festival and she asked me if it was true that we couldn't play. This baffled me. Turned out John had had a dream about us not being able to play the folk festival after having seen "No Smokey B" written on a kitchen pad. This had led to confusion and worry.

It was later discovered that this note meant that they had run out of smoky bacon flavour Nobby's Nuts. I saw fit, at this point, to laugh at John seeing as, not only had he become worried about us not playing, he had also neglected to order any more nuts.

That is the end of that, another thrilling episode of the Smokey Bastard blog. I thank you.

Kisses.
Chris

Degrees of Uselessness

Tick Tick Tick

In very roughly three months I and a few others in the band graduate from university (all things being well).

It's getting hard to avoid speculation about what might happen when I drop off the end of the playschool-infants-school-college-uni conveyor belt.

One thing is for dead certain:


(I can't work out whether I've put this image here illegally - AppleGeeks Lite kicks total ass, find and love it (and my favourite strip from it) here; that might get me off the hook...)

Degrees don't have the power they used to - I think most people admit that these days - but I'm pretty chuffed about having studied philosophy, since the real value of having studied it is not to be found on the (probably metaphorical in the UK anyway) piece of paper in the 'mail'. The value is that it means I can be philosophical about stuff, man (/dude etc.).

For example:

Hey, so maybe our degrees are useless - but who cares? So's our band, and that still kicks arse...

-Alex

Just thought you might like to know.

Squircle

- Mike

A Productile Post

Productivity

After the rhythm section of Bastard spent a long evening on Saturday night songwriting in the Ness Family Care Home, we agreed that Sunday would be a long day, an early start, a generally productive enterprise. "What?!" Bastard gasped, "get back here tomorrow for WHAT time in the frost-bitten god-forsaken winter morning?!" Ten o clock. No excuses.

So, come half past ten i was standing over the mumbling, sleeping form of Mike, in Chris' spare room, while Chris stumbled to the loo in his pyjamas (I say 'pyjamas' - I'm relatively sure they were his clothes from the day before), and a sleepy Andy on the other end of a mobile phone was explaining that Sophie hadn't yet got him breakfast in bed and so they might be another hour or so. Matt, to his credit, was already at the rehearsal, but it's his damn house. That just leaves Pat.

Hi Pat, if you're out there, somewhere.

Producibles

A solid TEN HOURS of songwriting later we've finished the weekend with some half-covered folk standards, a few half-written bits and bobs and two shiny and complete new songs: an original acoustic folk punk number called "Steve the Finchampstead Twat" and an original balls-out punk ejaculation called (something like) "Old Boys' State".

Product

I think it's interesting that although the lyrics for the two finished tunes were written by different band members completely independently of each other, they both reflect the same subtle change in theme (or maybe attitude) for Bastard. Although we still haven't written a single track which doesn't at least mention drunkenness, drink, drinking or drunks (ahem), both the new tracks seem to be noticably lacking any respect for the whole old-drunken-man-of-wisdom folk tradition that you find glorified even in our own early tunes like Old Jack.

I personally wonder whether the looming prospect of making an album might be having the interesting effect of making us focus more closely on what a folk punk record from our own hometown sounds like, and on writing and saying what we as individuals and as a band have to say and write. That is, as opposed to coming from some abstract idea of what folk punk bands do or say, we might really be heading towards making our very own product.
ok, just to avoid confusion, I should point out that no matter how righteous I get about our philosophy, we're still just a bunch of cunts shouting about stuff, I just think too much.

in other news:
prodManager

A tiny update: Smokey Bastard gave an official go-ahead to Barrie Barlow, signalling that we're well up for welcoming him on board as our manager subject to blah blah blah. With all his connections and experience as a real musician in the real business, friendly connections to us through the Crabtree Dynasty and an obviously genuine enthusiasm for what we're up to, he looks like just the right man for the job - let's hope it comes to pass!

Fingers crossed also that we get within sniffing distance of John Leckie producing us, though obviously who knows at this point, busy man, etc etc. Getting a really nice album made was the subject of the very first conversation I ever had with Barrie when we met in the Eldon Arms in December, and so I think he knows how much it means to us to get it right - the suggestion that Mr. Leckie might be able to have a hand is one to really get us salivating!

Producer?

For those of you who aren't wikipedia: John Leckie's production credentials go in one swoop from really well crafted raw early punk (e.g. The Adverts? Well worth a listening at) through the crunchy sounds of Britpop to the modern, more slick and complex rock, punk and pop (even music chumps will have heard these names: Radiohead, Muse), to the very subtly produced acoustic sounds of artists like Rodrigo y Gabriella or Shiv Kumar Sharma, and beyond. For an almost literally insane list covering Leckie's career, look here.

That John was also involved in the only even slightly celtic offerings that The Silencers ever recorded is probably a good sign, but as far as I can see it'll be mostly the fact that he uniquely has huge amounts of experience in both punk and world music that would make him absolutely THE man to put our sound on a disk.

I said: "that would make him absolutely THE man to put our sound on a disk!"

You think he heard?


-Alex

Curbing Our Enthusiasm

Greetings kittens,

GOOD NEWS and terrifyingly amusing news for you all this Happy Monday.

Firstly, we met with Barrie from Jethro Tull and things sound sexy and boy did he LOOK sexy. We still need to run things past Mike and Pat who were busy bumming each other elsewhere at the time of the meeting but we're getting close.

The exciting news is that the producer he's asked to record our album is none other than John Leckie, who worked on 'The Bends' with Radiohead and Muse's 'Origin of Symmetry'. COOL! Yes it is cool. As a result, we're pretty much going to TELL Mike and Pat that this is going ahead.

More news soon after we beat them into submission.

In other news, there has been a quite ludicrous turn of events in one band member's eternal quest to "get some ", as it were. For the sake of the story we shall call him MATTHEW NESS. Those of you familiar with Larry David's 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' will be ready for the cringe factor. Others may want to wear protective goggles.

So, one evening, Matt was out with boons*. Matt makes a habit of going out with boons. Nobody knows why. Anyway, he was making eyes at some chick. You know the kind of deal where you see a girl, register that she's hot, look away and carry on with your own business but can't stop turning around for another little peek? WELL IT WAS THAT. Turned out she was looking back so the lady's man thought "I'm in". He was not yet in.

She went out into the smokers' alley and Matt sat and contemplated whether he could bring himself to be so contemptible as to pretend he smoked so he could go and talk to her.

While his mind was in turmoil one of the aforementioned boons had already taken action, lit up and told the chick that Matt was all about that shizzle. Not being the quickest of cats, when questioned as to why Matt couldn't have told her this himself, the boon replied "I ....well....erm.....I dunno" and ran away.

This left Matt in dire straits. Upon hearing of this boon's foolish endeavour, he was left to explain to his newfound love interest that he was not, as had been made out, a massive baby and that he could talk to girls if he wanted to.

Come the end of the evening, and after much explanation, she said something like "see you next week" and Matt breathed a sigh of relief and went back to thinking "I'm in". He was not yet in.

This is where it gets a bit silly.

The next week Matt returned with a new entourage of boons, found his woman and initiated proceedings portending to coitus.

Immediately, and without hesitation, a boon arrived to ruin the day.

"Matt's in a band", she blurted.

Matt didn't know what to do. He panicked, as many would, as he worried that he looked like even more of a dickhead. Being sharp of mind, Matt quickly responded "Shut up. Don't say that", turned to the chick and told her, with firm authority, "I'm not in a band". Matt is in a band.

He now has a date with this chick, during which he must not divulge that he is in a band. Unfortunately, Matt and the band are one and the same. Without the band, Matt is a man with no interests. He will also no doubt tell ALL of his friends about this production deal lark so chances of keeping the band a secret are very low indeed.

Safe in the knowledge that she will never find out about the band or the blog, and if she does then it will all be ruined anyway, there will be more news when Matt fucks it up.

Kisses,
Chris


*Boons idiots, cretins, imbeciles, simpletons, chumps, pillocks, mongoloids, troglodytes, dimwits, dunces, morons, twits, weakest links, checkout supervisors.

Jethro, The Prosthetic Limb and The Ever-Questionable Dentist

Morning kids. How's tricks?

The majority of the band are meeting with Barrie Barlow this weekend to discuss this here production deal lark. This should hopefully result in some more solid plans which I can then relate to you via this exciting blog so stay tuned.

Apart from that I'm mainly just going to voice some thoughts.

Firstly, I was watching The Empire Strikes Back the other day because I'm fucking cool. Anyway, it got to the very end and it showed Luke's new robotic hand and I got to thinking; Would you get tired using a robotic limb?

I guess this boils down to whether a fully functional prosthetic limb would be actually robotic or just a synthetic replica of the limb it is replacing. Either way it would have to take motor neurone input to be at all useful but would it require oxygen from blood or would it function on a different power source. Would your robotic hand have a charger like a phone? If anybody knows I would greatly appreciate answers.

Sceondly, I'm no dentist but I went to my dentist the other day and I'm having my doubts as to whether he is really a dentist. It didn't used to bother me when I was a kid - The sooner I was out of that chair, the better - but now It's starting to irritate me. I am going to ask you to read the following aloud to yourself.

Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight

No Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, No Eight

How long did that take you? Fifteen seconds? Well however long it was, that is how long my dentist appointments last. He just counts my teeth and then I can leave. No other comments. He doesn't even verify if that is the right amount of teeth. Is it?

In conclusion, not a dentist.

Anyway, I'm done. I'll catch y'all for an update next week sometime, as this weekend I shall be rocking out to Dropkick Murphys and The Mad Caddies.

Kisses,
Chris

Johnny Loxley and the Infinite Baffle

So I found out today that apparently you can get different sized infinities. My argument goes like this:

Say you flip a coin an infinite number of times. The probability of getting, say, four heads in a row is 1. It is definitely going to happen, given the number of times the coin is flipped. By the same argument, the probability is 1 that ten heads in a row will show up. And twenty. And a million. But also, an infinte amount of heads, since there's infinite time to do it in.

So, I argued, the chances of getting an infinite number of heads, with an inifinite number of flips is 1. Surely that would mean that the possibility of getting a tails at any time is 0 (which obviously isn't true).

My maths friends told me it's something to do with different sized infinities, so that even though there are two infinities involved, one is bigger than the other. Which is why the probability of getting a tails is not 0. What?

I don't know, it made me think is all.

In other news: a) Drinking tea and beer only staves off hunger for so long, b) Real food is expensive and c) Toast is a life saver.

Don't am stupid,
- Mike