Viva Las Vague Arse

‘I’d rather go hungry than eat that shit.’
Came an American drawl as he walked passed Burger King in Las Vegas International Airport. Maybe some attitudes are changing in the US of A but that lone voice doesn’t speak for the 209 million people whose diet makes them walking miracles.
Having spent a week in the excess capitol of the world I’ve managed to put back on the stone I had lost, and that was with walking about 20 miles a day! Salad? What’s a salad? It’s actually that blood soaked green stuff you have on the side of your steak that the waitress wipes into the bin after your meal.
It took a good couple of days to adjust to the time difference, although having not slept properly for over a month I thought the 8 hours behind would not have mattered; but it did. More so to Steve Sync who not only suffered from jet lag, but also jet arse (sorry, ass!) and his daily quest to have a proper dump bore little fruit and the three huge meals a day piled up and up within him. It was Thursday’s intake of 911 Hot Wings at Hooters that did the laxing trick for him and he never looked back after that. The 911 wings (named so after the emergency services number in the States) is probably the hottest thing you’ll find to eat in Las Vegas (after the Hooters girls) as the Americans don’t seem to have spice on their menu. A visit to a mexican restaurant confirmed this when I requested my chicken fatijas nice ‘n’spicy,
‘No, you don’t want that sir.’
‘I do!’
I didn’t get it though. No, the Americans, or the Las Vegans at least like it with meat, rich and sweet (and weak lager), and that’s how it is. The steak is superb because the cows are well fed, but you can’t have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner unless you’re a body builder. Pancakes with maple syrup are a priority and even the world’s worst hangover couldn’t stop you drenching that syrup over the plate.
Myself and Sync needed a holiday, we’ve both been through the mill this year, due to one thing or another, we’ve worked hard, we’ve always played hard, so now was the time play a little harder. There was the option of a week in Spain, but we thought we’d look like two gays on the beach, then we thought of Amsterdam, but we’re filming Gong there for three days in November, then Sync came up with Las Vegas.
‘Las Vegas, what! All in for £512!? – Let’s go!’
If you’re 6’3” (as we are), you should have your legs surgically removed at the knees to accommodate a comfortable 10 hour plane journey. The makers of MyFlight aeroplanes must be blind lesbian dwarfs, MySpace, MyFlight, MyArse! A quick type of ‘Deep Veined Thrombosis’ into Google brings you directly to the flight operator’s website!
Las Vegas – the city that never sleeps, a fortune won and lost on every deal, The Strip, a four mile long High Street paved with gold and lined with the plushest hotels in the world. So how come we end up in a shack! America’s Best Value Inn – mould on the ceiling, crickets on the floor, tiles hanging off the walls. But who cares, we’re in Vegas!
Our first priority was food and we lunched in what would become a regular breakfast stop – Coco’s American Diner, which is EXACTLY like that ‘Any of you pricks move…’ diner on Pulp Fiction – EXACTLY. Uncannily in my back pocket is my wallet with ‘Bad Ass Mother Fucker’ stamped on it! Thankfully the diner wasn’t held up or robbed, although there was a sign in front of the till saying nothing higher than a $20 bill would be accepted during the graveyard shift.

Apparently pure oxygen is pumped through the floorboards of these countless casinos, to keep the gambler awake. There are no clocks – the city doesn’t sleep, although people do drift off at about 4am and things don’t get going until mid morning, but if you want to play roulette at 6am you can. We had a strategy; we were only going to play the tables on our last night, that way we wouldn’t end up skint half way through the week. So Saturday night we played Black Jack, minimum $10 bet. The pre-deal was that anything we won we would split 50/50. I bought $80 of chips and put $40 down on the first table and a couple of hours later walked away with $200. It was definitely beginner’s luck – 5 Black Jacks in one game! That was in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, also home to The House of Blues restaurant and venue, another regular haunt for ourselves. It was a cool bar decorated with bottle tops glued to the red walls in crucifix shapes and skulls painted everywhere. Downstairs was the venue, like a mini-Liverpool Royal Court hosting regular touring bands – this week its was POD, The Spazmastics, Jamie Callum and Ministry, the latter of whom we saw (see review). We also saw Arsenal limp out of the Champions League final at noon on Wednesday at the House of Blues; one of the few places to show soccer. The Americans don’t understand real sport! What’s all this American Football, Baseball and Basketball rubbish!? Every bar in town had one of them on. These hotels are not just hotels, they’re a community, a town, a leisure centre (sorry center) in their own right, and you can spend an entire day out of the blistering 104deg sun outside within the sanitised domains that this city has to offer. You can eat, gamble, drink, shop, swim, visit the zoo, go clubbing, see concerts, go the theatre all under one roof! Incredible!
More when it surfaces….

Spinning Home

Did a video shoot for Homespun to promote their new single Badman. The initial idea was to have the frontman Terry abducted in a sack during a gig, some nice enclosed shots of him singing in the sack, the band in the back of a van playing and then the ‘body’ being dumped outside a police station.
Of course, the storyboard goes clean out of the window on the day! We had the band dressed with vicar collars playing in the back of this big van with 3 cameras on them and torches for lighting – the van was then driven over speed bumps and round corners, so the band were thrown around everywhere! Dunno what that’ll turn out like as most of the torches became unhinged!
The song is called Badman, so we introduced a bad man to the proceedings; a menacing character in white biohazard overalls and a rabbit face mask sprayed black. Bad man lurked, stalked and haranged the band throughout the rest of the day and the Gods were definitely looking down upon us at the Nova car park in Prestatyn as the fog came rolling in off the sea. We had originally planned to film the band outdoors at The Ffrith’s disused car park, but the barriers prevented us getting the van in (they’ve had Traveller problems there for years), so the fog set the perfect backdrop. More than perfect – fucking fantastic! A quick change for Terry, Damien and Tony into white shirts, ties and pants and they set up on the prom with this superb misty grey background. I had recorded 3 versions of the song – normal, twice as fast, half as slow (speed change in videos are all the rage) and the bad man should look pretty good doing weird things at different speeds to the band. We then used the sack abduction idea and one by one the band were picked off while playing. The fog on the beach was too good an opportunity to leave out, so the bad man and the band were filmed walking in and out of it. Homespun’s manager Steve also made an appearance dressed, bizarrely as a nun and, looked very disturbing in a Robbie Coltrane kind of way. For the finale we had the whole band being forced into the sack on the beach and bad man and nun tried despairingly to drag them of into the fog. Unfortunately the bastards were far too heavy, so Terry was left in there and dragged off instead.
The autograph hunters got their momentos and we headed home.
Crew for the day: Terry Foster (Homespun / voc,gtr), Tony Tuna (Homespun / drms), Damien (Homespun / bass), Steve Semichilled (Homespun / manager, nun). 1000 Words - Paul Sutherland, Neil Crud, Gordon Hardman, Rob Mediapod, Sparky. And, of course Bad Man.
Great day – it’ll be an even better video!

The day after headed to The Vic in Menai Bridge for a BBC Radio Wales live broadcast featuring Akira The Don and Brave Captain (review). Met Sync off the train station (as I was already in Bangor) and had a pint and chat with Alan Holmes (of Ectogram) and Huw Prestatyn (from Rhuddlan!). Then bombed it back to Rhyl for 11.20pm to Bar Blu, to catch Jives Room (review) in robust form.

And hurrah!! – Finished The Alarm’s ‘Raindown’ video – Paul Suths came round and with a little tweaking he gave the nod!! Yes at last! He’s taken the tapes for the remainder of the Gathering electric to edit, as it’ll give the final version a touch more variety. I’ve still got the acoustic night ones and my G5 is off to my Nain’s for the week I’m in Vegas (for safe keeping).

Curried

Paul brought the ‘missing’ tapes round and we pieced together The Racketears song ‘So Many Faces.’ What a great band, can’t put my finger on what it is about them, but its just very very good stuff! Superb laid back persona. The video looks excellent and really portrays what they’re about; or what I think they’re about at least!

Also showed Paul Raindown, but he’s still not happy with it, Paul’s looking for less lip-synch and more broad concert shots. Mike Peters phoned me asking about it as well – so I nipped round to his rehearsal rooms and we watched it with tour manager Liam and a loitering Kirk Brandon. They were basically of the same thinking; more ‘great’ shots and less lip-synch. The single comes out in the States next month and they’re going to use the video off the Under Attack DVD as the main promo and use this ‘live’ one for the website.
Mike is off to New York week after next, while I’ll be in Las Vegas, so we’re going to get together in the next few days and do a preliminary for the Gathering video – basically to see how we piece the songs together – it’d be nice if we could do something a bit different rather than your average live video. Yes, the editing I’ve done so far is very different to your standard concert vids (and far better, even if I say so myself), there’s more feeling gone into them – passion, because that’s how I feel about music, that’s how Paul Suths feels as well; so it’ll always be 1000% from 1000 Words! (Marketing campaign being drawn up right now!).

Kirk Brandon is off on a European tour with Spear of Destiny so I gave Liam a copy of PSST’s video ‘Now Is The Time For England’ on the premise that its played on the big screen before the gigs!

Paul and Rob will be finalising the Complete Control Music (CCM) DVD – building a menu, EQ-ing the sound and matting the videos – hopefully on Friday.

Headed to Bar Blu for a Wednesday night of loud music – saw Glyn Bailey open up, even though watching acoustic sets is against my religion, he was ok – me and Ste Sync even clapped after 2 of the songs. Holyhead’s Hansons, DeMask played next – and had the sparse (by comparison with the last 2 weeks) crowd, leaping around. Amy’s voice is getting stronger (she is only 16 and about 2’4” !!) and you can’t fault their playing abilty – its technically spot on – the covers are getting less and their own material is far better live than on MP3. Unfortunately too many late nights and hardly any sleep got the better of me, so it was a garlic chicken madras hot at midnight, tucked up and fast asleep with half an hour.

Hank Bolliday

Got Broadband up and running at Crud Towers so did a 6am radio show! Only cos I woke up at 5.25am with an asthma attack - 1st one this year...
Enjoyed the stuff I played - love that Physicists 'Brad Pitt' song, superb. Love The Racketears, oh just love it all... summer of love coming up, or is it summer of mud? Nah, not for me - well, not at V this year cos I ain't going.

I am however off to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks with Steve Sync - strictly business, not pleasure - we're on a mission to see how much money we can lose.

I made a welcome return to BBC Radio Wales last night - with a new half hour stint on Adam Walton's Show - this time playing new stuff, rather than the retro I was previously doing. New music really excites me! (in a loin-cloth kinda way) - played BLACK BOX THEME, OYSTERBOY, DALE DAVIES and DELTA NINE with at least 2 (maybe 3) of them getting their 1st airplay - and deservedly so.
Felt really good to be back on the radio and Walton and I sounded almost professional (almost).

Did The Alarm single 'Raindown' for the second time after Paul Suths said the first one wasn't up to our high standards. Can take criticism 2 ways - you can sulk, or you can take heed and do better. I took heed and did better - at least I hope so - looks much better now.

Awaiting RACKETEARS tapes to finish the Complete Control showcase - all looking good so far.

Had a final meeting with Homespun over their forthcoming video - we start filming on May 9th.

Also looks like we're filming a 3 day GONG festival in Amsterdam in November... Cosmic...