UNLOCKING THE TIME MACHINE

The Real Tuesday Weld make a record for Dead People.
Buy In Memorium here
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Barely a week goes by without some new horror story about the London property market.  But accommodation has always been a problem here - even for the dead

The city is a teetering Necropolis. Countless thousands lie beneath our feet.  Until inner city burials were banned in the mid 19th C., everyone who died here was squashed into tiny parochial church yards.  Even before the horrors of the Black Death, tales abounded of body parts visible below thin layers of soil, corpses piled upon each other in cellars or left lying in the streets.  

The Victorians built 'The Magnificent Seven Cemeteries'  in a ring around the city to stop all that.  This month, in two of them,  Antique Beat are hosting 'The London Month of the Dead' with our friends A Curious Invitation. We are investigating the capital’s relationship with its deceased residents with workshops, walks, talks, a seance and an incredible array of speakers on death, dissection, bereavement, cemeteries, near-death experience, the paranormal **

As importantly, we are raising money for Brompton and Kensal Green cemeteries. My personal project is to raise enough to unlock 'The Brompton Time Machine' - better known as The Courtoy Mausoleum.  An interesting legend has grown up around this mausoleum because it is the only one in the cemetery for which there is no record of construction - and for which there is no key.  It hasn't been entered for over a hundred years. It is thought to have been designed by the Egyptologist and occultist Joseph Bonomi - pictured here. The legend is that it may have been a Time Machine or even part of wider 'London Teleportation System' **

Our aim is to raise enough to have the Mausoleum opened and a new key provided for future access / time travel. To that end, we have made a haunting new Ep called In Memorium  - a sequence of songs about death with our friends Lazarus and the Plane Crash, The Puppini Sisters and Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies.

Listen and buy it here

(If you buy a ticket to any event at London Month of the Dead, you get a complimentary copy included in your ticket price).

So go ahead
Help out the dead
And save a slice
Of the Afterlife..

And in case you need any more inducements to help raise (money for) the dead, here is the Lazarus Plane Crash song "The Clay's a Calling" exhumed from the In Memorium Ep.

* Of particular note to Londoners, may be 'A Day in the Life of Death' - a chance to ask a London undertaker all the questions you ever wanted to or  'Apocalypse Now and Then' when London's 'mass fatality planner'  will be explaining what will happen to us in the case of various disasters..

**Ironically, of the several ways of now getting quickly around London, one of the ones that has become more popular is 'The Brompton' - a fold-up portable bicycle.

LIFE AFTER LONDON

Death has rather been in the air of late.  Despite the sunshine that has finally blazed London in light and with Andy Murray radiating health, victory, success and all that, I seem to have been involved in some rather morbid activities.  And I mean that in the most positive way.

Did you know that it is perfectly legal in the UK to bury someone in your garden?  But only one person.  Beyond that you would have a cemetery - which requires planning permission.  Oh and you have to mention it on the Property Deeds which apparently reduces the value of the place  (although not for me, I have to say).  I learned this fact from the very lively Dr John Troyer of the Centre for Death Studies at one of the excellent Morbid Anatomy series curated by Joanna Ebenstein at The Last Tuesday Society. 

For sometime, I have been mulling over what I would like to happen to my mortal remains and now I know.  John mentioned various techniques as  alternatives to cremation.  One  is an incredible sort of steam punk machine which sort of sucks your juice out.  Didn't quite fancy that but I do like the technique where you (or the ex-you) is freeze dried in nitrogen until you are very brittle. Then a sonic boom

is fired at you and 'puff!' you are reduced to a pile of something rather like coffee granules.

Then we were down at West Norwood Cemetery for a London Dreamtime event last weekend.  The cemetery is one of the 'Magnificent Seven Great Gardens of Sleep'  built by the Victorians to solve the terrifying problem of London's dead in the nineteenth century.  It is quite posh and well kept, certainly much more so than the crumbling gothic Nunhead - its only neighbour south of the river.  I haven't been before and was keen to see if I could find the teleportation chamber built by Bonomi and Warner (more on that here).  I think it may be in the Greek quarter.

Speaking of South of the River, if you live in London you will be aware of the great divide.  South definately feels different than North - which has often spuriously claimed to be posher, more sophisticated, somehow more London.  This may have its roots in that during the eighteenth century, bodies found floating in the river were allowed to be used by surgeons for anatomical experiments.  Those landed on the north bank fetched a better price for those who dredged them as there was a greater demand from the northern hospitals..

Tomorrow I am filming a trailer for Hendricks Carnival of Knowledge for which we are programming a London Day of the Dead in October.  It will be "a guide to what to do in London the day after you die" and will be chock full of information, entertainment and hopefully a taste of the afterlife (or at least of Hendricks).  More on that soon.  

If you can, I hope you will come - assuming we are all still around by that time that is ..

BOWLED OVER BY LOVE

Sitting here in the dark listening to Loose Ends on Radio Four I was thinking of the pre-war British crooner Al Bowlly as earlier I walked past the Duke Street corner in St James where he met his peculiar and untimely end. I've long been a fan and in the late nineties  I had a very strong dream about him which, along with another about a certain American actress,  kick-started The Real Tuesday Weld.  

Al was in a way the first British pop star - although of course he was actually Mozambique born and discovered singing in a South Africam barbershop by an impressario whose hair he was cutting .  His extraordinary voice and swarthy good looks set him above the bandleaders who were usually the stars at the time.  He made a mind boggling number recordings and played countless show before his final appearance in HIgh Wycombe on the 17 April 1941. 

He died later that night when his apartment building was bombed and he ignored the Blitz warning.  In a surreal twist, it appears he was actually killed by his bedroom door which was blown off in the blast and knocked him over.  

Here he is singing Close Your Eyes.

I was talking about all this with Ned Sherrin who used to present Loose Ends one time we played it.  After the show Ned would take his guests to the nice pub round the corner from the BBC where he would have a lunch set up behind a roped off area.  It was always the same.  Ned wouldn't eat anything but he would have a bottle of champagne. The guests could eat and drink whatever they wanted -  apart from his champagne.  When he finished the bottle he would leave you to it and get a cab back to his home in Chelsea.

Before he left he told me that he knew a secret about Al Bowlly.  He didn't actually say I couldn't tell anybody and sadly he is dead now too so I don't suppose he, Al or anyone else would mind after all this time.  You see apparently in his youth Ned had a romantic liason with an older man (Johnny?) who told him he had been Al Bowlly's lover.  Apart from the fact that it would have been impossible to be publicly homosexual at the time, Al's career and reputation was based on him being a romantic ladies' man so this would have been a very private affair.  And of course he was married  - and twice  - although the first attempt only lasted two weeks after his bride was allegedly found in bed with another man on their wedding night. Wow.

Anyway, Ned told me that the older gentlemen had told him that the reason Al had not heeded the siren call to the shelter which would have saved him was that they were together that night and did not want to risk being exposed.  

I always found something haunting about the image of the doorway as a metaphor for death and particularly in this case which influenced the writing of The Real Tuesday Weld song "Bringing the Body Back Home'   -  for in a final poignant twist Ned told me that Al's lover had always kept the very door that killed him. I suppose it may still be out there somewhere - like Al.

LOVE AND DEATH IN PARIS

I will be in Paris on Valentine's Eve  - playing with the The Real Tuesday Weld at Le Comedy Club . I am looking forward to it especially as we have already released a live album 'recorded in London on Valentine's Eve 2012,  the last night before the apocalypse'  This album was beamed back to us in a dream.  Assuming the dream was metaphorical, as many are, that the Mayans or whoever it was got it wrong and that we are still all here on the 14th, I intend to spend Valentine's day in the City of Love at Pere Lachaise  - which is of course in fact a rather wonderful City of the Dead.  


I've always associated love, death and dreams together.   I guess true love is a kind of dying (une petit morte as it were) to one's ego and hence something to be both feared and desired in equal measure.  To paraphrase Mark Twain: I have always loved life so I hope I shall love death.  That is one of the reasons we made Catherine Anyango's artwork for the aforesaid album as a real life blank Last Will and Testament form.  You can complete this for the benefit of your loved ones if you haven't done one already (most of us, unable to contemplate the idea of our demise, have not). 


Personally I find spending time thinking about my own inevitable end a useful prompt to love my friends and foes rather better.

I hope to meet you at our Paris show or perhaps at one of our shows in Gent, Brussel or Alsace that proceed it  but if I don't, above is a song on the theme at hand - it is a demo and rather ragged so forgive me for that. And, so as not to get too sentimental, here is Woody Allen on the matter:

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.” 

See you on the other side then?

TIME OF THE MONTH

Here is the Canongate trailer for Glen's book. Music by yours truly - although that isn't me singing of course. That's the very lupine Joe Guillotine from Lazarus and the Plane Crash. He gargles with ground glass.

It is a curious idea isn't it - a trailer for a book? I like it. We did this one too a little while ago for a Stephen King book collection. Quite disturbing I thought.

Whatever next - a trailer for an a record? - Oh yes, we did one.

The Last Werewolf album is done. As ever, it grew into something bigger and hairier than will fit on a disc or an overnight bag and like the moon it has a dark side and a light side.

I will share some of it soon.  In the meantime, I would appreciate any strange moon related anecdotes or facts from my friends here -  or any pointers to beautiful moon imagery.

RIVER'S END

Early on Saturday morning there was a dead body lying spread-eagled face down in the shallows at low tide by Lambeth Bridge.  A suicide or an accident? A drunk perhaps who became lost and got stuck in the mud? Or a victim of foul play?There has been nothing in the news so probably not the last at least.  An hour or so later the body was gone - in all likelihood taken to the Wapping River Police Station and then on to the mortuary at Poplar.  But then to where?

In the old days it would have been landed at the stone stairs you can still see under Tower Bridge where it meets the north bank.  This place was formerly known rather un-subtly as 'Dead Man's Hole"

The corpse was just another of the fifty or so who are found in the Thames each year.  Until fairly recently the number was double that  - mobile phones have meant that more people, whether jumpers or tumblers, are rescued.  Of course in past centuries, the Thames was virtually a liquid cemetery - an unholy Ganges.  Bodies were indiscriminately dumped there - the murdered, those who could not afford a funeral, unwanted children and many more suicides.

It has always also been the site of strange and unexplained murders.  In 1982 the Italian Roberto Calvi known as 'God's banker' was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge  and in 2001 the headless torso of a child 'Adam' was found  near Tower Bridge.  Investigations revealed it to probably have been a victim in a South african voodoo ceremony.

Rivers and bridges have always been symbols of our journey to the afterlife. Glen and I made this little piece a few years back about the river as final voyage.

I suppose we will never know much about the dead person lost and found last Friday night Saturday morning.

Will they be missed?  I hope so - this is for whoever it was and for all the dead the river has taken.  

Onwards.