Automatic Grape Foam

If, like me, you often find yourself having to come up with the name of a famous actor who you need to disguise yourself as you’ll probably have a couple of reliable names you can pluck out of the ether without much effort. Mine are Vincent Price and Sidney Poitier. You might have Hattie Jacques and John Le Mesurier, or Adam West and Marlon Brando. You can have whoever you like, there aren’t any rules. You can have more than two if you need them. It is up to you, I can’t tell you how to live your life and even I tried to I doubt you’d listen to a word I have to say even though I am always right about these things, like that time you were going to spend all that money on those expensive sausages because you were having your family round and your mother always complains about whatever you give them unless its sausages and even then if they aren’t excellent sausages from the butcher then she’ll go on and on and on and on and on about her old butcher when she was a child living in Chelmsford and how the butcher had sawdust on the floor and was really fat and you can’t trust a thin butcher, just like you can’t trust a bald barber.




Here's a picture of a fat butch... hang on

 

Do you remember what I said? That’s right, I told you to tell them to and fuck themselves. Of course, when your father died later that year and you were no longer in the will because they had disowned you, you tried to make out that it was my fault. Thing is, they had started to hate you a long time before that ever happened. They told me so that time I took them all out to the dog racing and made them put a grand on Lusty Veronica, who should have won really. I told you about that didn’t I? Never mind. And stop trying to set fire to my house. It’s pissing me off.



Anyway, I digress. Last Tuesday I was skulking around the local retail park trying to decide whether I wanted to buy myself:

• A tub of screenwipes.

• A bag of compost.

• 24 petrol blue carpet tiles.

• A Power Rangers duvet cover (reduced).

• 3 frames of ten-pin bowling for the price of 2.



I was stood on the corner weighing up the pros and cons and those things which seem like cons but, on closer inspection turn out to be pros, until you actually make the decision when they turn out to have been cons all along, when who should come out of the garden centre but a guitarist I had to fire from an old band. He had a length of hose under one arm and a bag of charcoal briquettes under the other and some kind of flowering shrub stuffed down the front of his trousers. Not wishing to be recognised and decided that if he saw me and tried to speak to me I would pretend to be the spirit of Vincent Price, tell him I was late for the bowling league and run off.

He didn’t see me though. I lurked around for a while longer, kind of hoping he would come back. He didn’t and it began to rain, so I went home for my dinner. I had fish fingers.

Meeting him, the guitarist, who I fired, from that band, back then, before, reminded me that he was the only person I have ever met who managed to make his musical instrument speak the language of his very soul. And it sounded like the death squawk of a terminally constipated goose lodged in the severed head of Janet Street-Porter, being fired from cannon at an orphan, on crutches, at Christmas, for ever and ever. This contributed to his departure from the band. In a strange twist of fortune this week I will be attempting to recreate this very sound for our new song Kompressor. I know I won’t be able to create anything as unpleasant because my soul is not a filthy motorway service station toilet, shellacked with the accumulated secretions of four decades worth of lonely truckers, onanists and perverts.


Why not have a go yourself? I know why.