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.

THE LONDON SANDMAN

Re. Dave McKean at Salon for the City June 26th
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Were you a fan of Neil Gaiman's 'The Sandman' series as I was as a youngster? Somehow it made the undeniable fairytale appeal of fantasy works relevant in a way that The Lord of the Rings, however wonderful, just couldn't to urban youth.

Or was it just the long The Matrix-style coats and cool haircuts?

The Sandman is a "story about stories and how Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, is captured and subsequently learns that sometimes change is inevitable".  It was right up my street. Plus, crucially, girls liked it too.  The dust covers from the many The Sandman editions were made by Gaiman's friend and long-term collaborator, the British illustrator Dave McKean (and were so good they were eventually released in their own volume). I loved them.  

Dave is a horribly talented illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker and musician. His work incorporates drawing, collage, painting, found objects, photography, digital art and sculpture.  His collaborations with Gaiman on The Sandman and Coraline plus countless CD and book covers have inspired many other artists and writers.  He is also a very nice guy.

And, he is coming to speak at our Salon for the City next week to talk / sing / play  about London in his work.  Hurrah!

I recently saw him performing live with Neil Gaiman at the British Library at the opening of the 'British Comics Unmasked' show curated by our out other guest at the Salon the fantastical Paul Gravett.  It was super.  Neil has obviously done a deal with some demon - he is annoyingly good looking, seemingly eternally youthful, also horribly  talented, massively successful - and very nice too to boot..

Here he is reading the poem 'The Saucers have Landed' live in my bootleg recording.



Dave McKean at Salon for the City June 26th

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 ..

LONDON AT THE LIBRARY

I am very pleased to be able to announce that Antique Beat's latest production is about to launch. It is called "LONDON AT THE LIBRARY" and it is a "Salon for the City".

London is such a large metropolis and such a vast subject that the city itself is the only remit here.  Anything goes. We are starting off on November 29th with the very entertaining and rather handsome Dr Matthew Green, writer and guide, talking on London's 17th century coffee houses followed by the mountaineer Marcus Risdell, curator of the Garrick Club speaking about the strange phenomenon of  London's Gentlemen's clubs.

But we won't be sticking to just historical themes: we have talks on the future of the city, the city at night, occult London, product placement in London theatre shows, life as a taxi driver with many more subjects planned. 

The salon is being hosted by myself and the very redoubtable Rossella Black who has been doing really extraordinary things at Westminster Arts Library for some time.

It will take place on the last Thursday of every other month. We will have two speakers on a connected aspect of the city and leave time to converse in a fairly informal atmosphere. Future speakers include authors Craig Armstrong, Anthony Clayton, Sukdev Sandhu, Glen Duncan, London Business School's Andrew Scott, storyteller Vanessa Woolf, fashionista Susie Ralph and host of others. Sometimes we will have performances and occasionally there will be a films.  There will also be our tiny London shop and I will be spinning a 'Soundtrack for the City' each evening.

Everyone is welcome but space is quite limited sadly.  There is more information and details of how to book here.  I look forward to seeing you there if you can make it.  

And, in the meantime..

DAY-DREAMING IN WESTMINSTER

I went with friends to the Philip Glass marathon four-and-a-half hour "Einstein at the Beach" at the Barbican this week. It is a masterpiece of psychedelic minimalism, strange and lovely - and with absolutely no comedown. I confess I did drift off a few times - mainly because I was day-dreaming about how Einstein used to seem much cooler than Isaac Newton. I rather took against the latter in the old days because I found physics (or at least my physics master) very dull.  But also of course because my hero WIlliam Blake depicted Newton as the manifestation of repressive rationalism and the malign forces of anti-imagination (see the image here).

I have recently changed my mind - mainly because of my friend Rosella Black who curates the Westminster Arts Library just behind the National Gallery.  The library sits on the site of Newton's old house in St Martin's Lane - now long gone like so much of lost London.  I have been researching the house a little and reading more about the man. I particularly like the story of how he would often get up in the morning but only make it as far  the edge of his bed and remain there lost in some thought for hours whilst his toast went leathery and coffee got cold.  I occasionally do the same thing myself  - although, it has to be said, with far less productive results to show for it

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Newton.  Perhaps to facilitate dreaming by day and sky-watching by night, he built himself a little glass observatory on the roof of the house where he spent many happy hours.  This was obviously in the time before Leicester Square and Westminster was all lit up with neon.  Sometime after his death, the observatory was bought  by an American follower who presumably took it back to the States and re-erected it there.  I would be very interested to hear from any American friends or physicists who know of its whereabouts.  I also came across a curious obscure record claiming that the whole house was drawn, carefully taken down and put into storage somewhere.  Yet another holy grail for us seekers of London Arcana.  If you know where it is, do let me know.

Rosella and I will be hosting a regular London Salon at the library later this year.  More on that soon but in the meantime, if you are free, we will be playing a couple of songs there next Saturday May19th with a host of wonderful guests for the Arctic Circle 6th Birthday Party.   You can get a recording of last year's Christmas concert where we also played a couple of seasonal songs (and a load of other lovely things) here.

Arctic Circle was founded and is mainly run by champion day-dreamer Ben Eshmade.  I attended his own birthday party at Marine Ices the other week and witnessed him demolish a Newton's Observatory sized knickerbocker glory. It is difficult to know how to applaud him enough.  He has been putting on the most beautiful, magical gigs, events, radio shows and all manner of wonderful happenings working away against the odds, against the tide for the last six years.  There is really nothing like him, not even a penguin.  

I hope he  - and Arctic Circle  - get much older..

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?