Bombskare

Just discovered that I’m old. I’ve always shouted at the TV but I have never thrown pasta at it before. That’s what old people do. Crazy old people. But what else can we do? If God didn’t want us to throw things at the TV then why does he keep putting Jeremy Clarkson on the fucking thing. To anyone in Croatia reading this right now, let me explain who Jeremy Clarkson is. He’s sort of an English version of Marie Antionette. Let me now say that I think Jeremy Clarkson should be shot. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. If you are offended then I was just kidding. Just speaking hyperbollockly as I am known to do. I was momentarily upset when he said how dare public sector employees strike over their ‘gold plated’ pensions when the rest of us have to work for a living. Of course when he means work, he means being paid millions of pounds of license fee money to have cars bought for him and drive about in circles all day. Yeah, that’s a man’s work. They came to my door recently and said, hey our records show you haven’t bought a TV license, to which I showed them the picture I have of Jeremy Clarkson pinned to my blood stained dart board and said, this cunt won’t be prancing about with any of my cash in his back fucking pocket, so feel free to fuck off and if you do come back, make sure you bring your top boy. And they haven’t been back. Seriously though, I’m sure the BBC does a lot of good work. I only ever use the TV to watch BBC News 24 anyway, which is depressing enough without having to pay for it. The news this year has been rubbish, worldwide revoulution, riots, economic and financial ruin. David Cameron has vetoed a new European treaty basically because it would tax and regulate the City of London, not the actual city you understand, but the square mile around Threadneedle Street where all the money is. After all the last thing we would want to do right now is tax and regulate the banks. Better to just press on with failed austerity programmes that are destroying the social fabric of the country in order to sort our massive debt. Balance the books on the backs of working people, not hedge funds and banks and the City of London. What about the growing social unrest and anti democratic forces at play all across Europe, from Tottenham all the way to Athens? Fuck it, nothing bad has ever happened from social unrest and anti democratic forces in Europe as far as I can remember. Everyone is also very concerned about Iran and their alleged weapons programme. A total distraction in my view. We should be more concerned about Root System’s weapons programme. They’ve been trying to weaponise Ska for years, whilst simultaneously denying Bad Manners right to exist. They are also Madness deniers. They deny Madness ever happened, even though we have pretty convincing records. Pretty extreme stuff and they are just over the bridge, which means they really could hit us within forty five minutes. These are just rumours by the way but it would be irresponsible of me not to repeat them. I have to confess I felt a little bad before, when I laughed at Roddy Radiation not being invited to the U.N Ska Summit. It was a cheap shot. It’s nothing to do with his abilities, he’s a capable guitarist, a very nice gentleman, it’s because he is a security risk, naturally. If the X Men movies have taught us anything, and I believe they have, it’s that you have to be extremely careful with that much radiation at the U.N, frankly you’re just asking for trouble. Naturally radiation doesn’t affect me, I fell into a cauldron of the stuff as a child, but for others it can be dangerous to be exposed to such high levels of irradiated skank guitar. To show there were no hard feelings we invited him up to Fran’s birthday party and we played a set of covers with this This R2 Tone. You can see from the photos that Colin was getting uncomfortably close behind Roddy, and he does look understandably worried, but it all worked out fine. In the end Colin said he was one of the most giving lovers he’d ever had. That’s sweet. We’ve finished the Ska this year. The Ska has been completed you might say, the live Ska anyway. Our last gig of the year was the Prestonpans Labour Club, the sort of gig that has been our bread and butter for ten years, where the crowd don’t know you and you have to win them over with sheer drunken magic. No problem for a charismatic bunch of two fisted he-men like us because that’s our speciality, drunken magic. The secret is lager, drink as much as you can, as fast as you can and do the gig before you fall over. I learned that trick from Judi Dench, not directly of course. I read it in ‘Intoxication Secrets of the Stars’ which is also where I found out that Justin Timberlake wears a cock ring on his vagina. Great night and good to catch up with the boys from Big Fat Panda. I forgot to tell Big Andy to get up to the zoo, and stamp his authority with the new panda, bloody immigrants, coming over here and stealing all our panda jobs. Or something. As soon as we got back from that gig, the snow came. Time to hibernate and focus on the recording which is virtually completed. The problem is the guys insist on making multiple copies of the album itself, something about selling it to the people. My view is that we should have one copy and sell it for a fortune. Little difference of opinion there. We’ve already started planning 2012, which according to the Mayans and Hollywood is going to be the end of the world so we’ll be hitting the ground running, in anticipation of the end times. To get the ball rolling we’ll be in Inverness, Aberdeen, Dumfries and Shetland before the end of January. Dumfries will be interesting; no Sam, as he has a court appearance for masturbating out of the window. I really thought he would have learned his lesson from last time; and our second gig ever without Papa Joe who is off getting his back varnished, so we will be featuring Ms Mandy Clarke on bass guitar. Mandy was outraged that we had reprogrammed Waz for bass back in September instead of asking her, so this time round, since Waz will be on drums at that gig, she was the first person we asked to play the role of Joe. You might think that it’s not an obvious choice for understudy since Mandy is small and lovely, whereas Joe is monstrous and terrifying. However Ms Clarke rocks the bass guitar in Super Adventure Club, who truly are monstrous and terrifying. Bombskare absorbing 66.6% of Super Adventure Club is going to be fantastic. Shetland is also going to be amazing, even better than the last time. We returned in October after seven years to Lerwick and Scalloway and had an amazing time, saw a lot of old friends. It was such as a success we’ve been invited back up to play after the Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick. Look it up nerds. Basically it’s a giant fire festival, held all across Shetland, everyone dressed as Vikings, complete with burning longboats, alcohol and thousands of mad Shetlanders. And Bombskare. What could possibly go right? Merry Christmas folks.

First off let me sort out some rumours that have been floating about. No, Joe and I are not leaving the band to form our own side project called Combskare. That’s just daft. Obviously it just makes sense to stay in the band and wait till everyone else is bald. Another rumour is that we are a punk band. Technically we are a genetically modified hybrid of Ska and Punk called Skunk, which you can easily tell because of our pungent aroma, overwhelming lethargy and deleterious side effects. At the music awards someone actually asked me if I was the brains of the operation, to which I laughed so hard beer came out my nose. And I was drinking milk. Let me disabuse this notion once and for all, there are no brains in this operation. Brains are a massive hindrance. Men of action can’t afford to think. Does a tiger think? Does a pterodactyl think? Thinking causes hesitation, and hesitation causes your worst fears to happen. So how do decisions get made? Short answer, they don’t. We leave it all up to the twisted design of the universe. If Bombskare was a train, we’d all be in the buffet car getting hammered, and no one would be driving. Where are we going? We’ll find out after the crash. When we picked up the award I did take the opportunity to point out to the assembled music types that we were clearly the best dressed band in the building, and so therefore incapable of being a punk band much as we might like to be. Incidentally we’ve already tried selling the actual music award itself, the trophy, down at Smack Generator, just like we do with all our Baftas, but the most they could offer us was an old SM58 with a dented shield. So we still have the thing. In other band news ever since the passing of Lloyd Knibb, our spiritual father and patron saint, we have been a bit lost. Directionless you might say, but all that’s about to change because now we have a new patron saint. Cue the drum roll. It’s the re-animated corpse of Lloyd Knibb. They said it couldn’t be done, they said I was mad, but I proved them. Again. Just like my amazing plan to breed a race of genetically modified footballing supermen to help us qualify for the World Cup in Rwanda 2036. Anyway Lloyd is a lot more helpful like this, although he doesn’t move about as much. He wasn’t too quick before I suppose, but now he has all this wonderful advice such as, ‘Brains! Need brains!’ Hey Lloyd, I realise you are a hideous undead creature from beyond the grave and an abomination unto the Lord, but pay attention. I’ve just finished saying that brains are a massive hindrance in this band. At the minute he’s chained up in the lab, that’s right we have a lab, but I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong. Science, Ska and the Undead, sounds like a winning combination to me. Aside from branching out into necromancy, or skaromancy, we have been gigging. Toots and the Maytals at the O2 Academy was good, even if it was a short set, twenty five minutes. Quite a few people complained about Toots daughter’s mangling of the Tina Turner tune. I could have done without that frankly. We headlined at a new festival in East Lothian called Audio Soup with our old friends Taking Chase, who are jealously guarding a new album we can’t wait to hear. Highlights of Audio Soup included Clogg and the Quirks, a young band who had the ubiquitous Phil ‘Big Hand’ Ramsey up for their cover of Big Hand’s ‘Magnet’. Cracking stuff. Loopallu was a cracker too, featuring Phil Hopwood on guitar and our very own stunt drummer, Captain Waz ‘The Waz’ Wazzster, but cleverly reprogrammed for bass guitar. For sheer skill, my hat is off to him, a man of such style like you’d not often find. He’s also very highly regarded in his native Wazistan. We could only spend one night in Ullapool unfortunately but we had a great time, especially afterwards in the pub, jamming with everybody, although I have absolutely no recollection of it. Cheers to The Imagineers and I’d also personally like to thank Kassidy for controlling themselves, sexually, whilst around us, we know how tough that was. That night we slept in the church in Ullapool, an Episcopalian one I believe, always best to sleep on holy ground especially in that part of the world. So that seems to be the end of festival season then. One thing that I won’t be missing is eating food from service stations. Can I just say that in no part of the world is a cheese and onion sandwich, a bag of Walkers crisps and a bottle of Coke considered to be a meal, and £2.99 is definitely no deal. One other thing we also went down to Ashington to play ‘ahr Tony Eastlake’s 50th birthday party. He had a marquee set up in his back garden and a hefty PA system. That’s pretty much our natural environment. What a night it was. I woke up with my head inside a plastic bag, clearly an assassination attempt gone wrong. Happy Birthday Tony, cheers for a great party although I haven’t had sore head like that for a long time. Andy and I shared a bottle of champagne on the way back which totally sorted out /postponed the hangover. The next thing we have coming up is our long awaited return to Shetland. We are very excited about this one. We’ll be there exactly ten years to the weekend of our first trip up there, playing the exact same venues with the immortal Steve Hook doing the sound again. On that occasion Jeff picked us up at the airport in an old ambulance that was literally packed to the gunnels with Tennants lager. And that was us for three days. It was the stuff of Viking sagas. This time instead of a one hour flight from Aberdeen, it’s a fourteen hour ferry crossing from Aberdeen. It’s going to be great although I don’t think I’ll be able to take the punishment I took last time. Remember, it’s not the years it’s the mileage.

Would you like to know the secret of our awesome success? Dress every day like you are going to be stabbed to death in your clothes. Like my father said ‘if you try, then try to win’, and he should know, he was an Olympic class Glaswegian. When we turn up to these festivals like the Wickerman or Knockengorroch we are always slightly sickened at the poor dress sense on some of these losers. Just because you’ve slept in a ditch, out of your mask on magic mushroom whisky doesn’t mean you can’t wear a nice tie. Ask yourself, would you prefer to be shot in the face whilst wearing a giant foam top hat and a T shirt that says “Wantin’ Pumped?”, or a bespoke pork pie hat and a fifty quid off the shelf suit that makes you look like a very serious and successful individual or in my case, a bus driver who slept in the depot? It’s like choosing between Sean Connery and Roger Moore, it’s not even a decision. On the subject of Wickerman some people were surprised by our fairly impromptu cover of Sublime’s ‘Date Rape’, controversial on many levels, subject matter, tempo, delivery. But mainly they were surprised that we had Colin singing it. Most people don’t think of Colin as a multi-talented individual, they think of him more as someone who wanders about with a giant cartoon dog solving mysteries, which I think is a bit unfair. We told Colin that if he did a good job we would have a star named after him. As it is, we’ve down graded that to a black hole. Still. Also top marks to the wonderful Jane Meanie who did a great job on ‘Do All Dogs..’ with no rehearsal and a fair bit of nerves. Well done my dear. And thanks to the intrepid Gordon of Khartoum for manning our merch stall during our set. Now as you all know, this year is the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible. Personally I’m not sure if I approve of it being translated into English. What was wrong with the Latin Vulgate version? It’s like Mariah Carey doing a cover version of ‘Without You’, you’re just messing with a classic. Anyway to commemorate this fairly influential book we’ll be playing in Inverness this Saturday. What does Inverness have to do with the KJB you ask? That’s a very deep and rather profound question actually. The lord moves in mysterious ways they say. Not me. I worship Set. You may laugh but I’ve never once had a bad harvest. In other news we were very disappointed at the cancellation of the Northern Light Festival in Aberdeen. A stone cold bummer you might say. We were seriously gutted about it, and no, it wasn’t just losing out on our huge appearance fee and crazy rider demands (we demanded enriched uranium), we were looking forward to trashing Madness’s dressing room. How do you console yourself after a missed opportunity like that? An enormous cheeseboard maybe. Or the second idea I think of. Also, what’s this music award all about? We have no idea. How the hell did we get nominated and when did we become a punk band? Anyway we have nearly completed all the tracking for the next album. We’ve been working through a checklist, as long as your arm, of all the bits and pieces that we have to overdub or re-record for whatever reason, but that list is now down to four things so we can see the light at the end so to speak. It’s taken a while to get to this point but still faster than the first time round with all our stops and starts, and still faster than it took to translate the King James Bible into English. We have over ninety minutes of music to whittle down to a solid album, and even at this stage it sounds pretty good, to my ears anyway. You can listen to the studio version of ‘Do All Dogs Go To Heaven’ on Soundcloud, which is 99% complete but unmixed. The songs that don’t make the album will be assembled into an apocrypha one would assume, and locked in a vault somewhere. Although non canonical these songs will probably make an appearance at some point. Perhaps near the Dead Sea in two thousand years.