Space Filling
"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard smooth floor of the wardrobe, she felt a number of little oblong boxes that rattled curiously when she shook them. "This is very queer," she said, and went on a step or two further.
You used to be able to reach Narnia through the back of our wardrobe, but now the way is blocked by the flotsam and jetsam caused by advancing technology. Yes, I am referring to cassettes and vinyl. Thanks to some brilliantly farsighted marketing decisions made by The Dear Leader back when we all thought CDs weren't for real, we have an amazing plastic mountain which we'd simply love to dispose of. Any serious offers from would be anarcho-indie-punk-distributors who want to ruin themselves by charging pre-Crass prices for antique artefacts will be considered sympathetically. All proceeds to the steeple fund. So what of that enigmatic drive towards the shining goal of solvency? What is it all in aid of, you may ask, and why should it be any concern of yours if TDL's five year plan went awry and left him with no trousers and a million Pastor Skull cassettes which the natives won't trade for real estate? Here, gentle reader, in our new spirit of 'openness' and 'awareness' is the current plan.
The Way Forward
Sitting comfortably? Jolly good. Firstly, the plan is to record and release a new CD of a dozen or so songs. Work is in hand at the moment to rehearse the material, artwork was designed aeons ago, and we aim to take the new band into Trinity Heights and have Fred Purser do his thing to it. A final choice of songs has not yet been made, but it will include those that found their way into the live set of the last line-up, including Cider Dreaming Time, which didn't make it onto the Caesar CD because Joseph 'spontaneously redesigned' it on the actual night. Oops sorry. There is a huge backlog of unrecorded songs here at party HQ, and we are determined to shift them out soon. Hurrah for the glorious and democratic leadership of Chairman Cat and his illustrious minions! The spanner in the works is the ongoing debt mountain owed by the band, which although having been slashed by a massive 66% under the new amazing management team-leadership, is still a nagging hurdle. We are optimistic that it will have been reduced to bite sized chunks inside another year, at which point we will have the songs amply ready to record, and can then hurl ourselves once more unto the breach. I know it's been a tediously long time since the last 'real' CD, and we're very keen to get the new band recorded, but until the grotesque mess of the last decade has been expunged and new wallpaper put up, you're going to have to bear with us. In the meantime, be pure, be vigilant, and behave. Oh, and buy cassettes and vinyl - you know you want to really…..
Live Skill
Both the band and the guitar-playing dwarf are still much in evidence around the country, as are Eastfield, who moved us almost to tears with their all-encompassing beauty at The Dublin Castle gig. They were that good. Special mention in despatches for notorious 'young man' Aston, who has been driving us all around in a horse-less carriage. The band has been applying themselves to their homework (jolly good show), which resulted in Lines of Graves reappearing in London, and should find Better to Bat, and others surfacing soon. Dates to watch out for over our slack summer break are Sheffield University on 30th July, Stockton Riverside festival on 4th August, and anywhere else you can make it to, as they will all be splendid. There have been changes since the last mailout, so please check first - and do ring the mobile.
Stock Reports
Oh crikey! Will they stop at nothing to flog you things? The last of the live skulls has finally gone (hurrah!), and stocks of Out From Under the King are running down. It's good to see the old stock running out, as we want to look forward to the next couple of decades, and in line with this new optimism we will not be re-issuing any of the old recordings, so either get them while you can, or do the smart thing and bootleg them on your CD ROM. Any future releases featuring material from the first seven Blyth Albums will be new recordings. Sorry to those purists among you who believe that anything is sacred if it's the original, but this is the way it has to be. Mugs are all gone for the moment, although we will be making a new one featuring the Ixion design. Don't order it yet, though, as it will be a while before we have them. Hurrah! By the way, anyone who received their mug in a nice specially made 'mug-mailer' - have you any idea of the cost of the dratted things? Re-cycle, you green people. You know it makes sense. (Actually we burn tyres and eat organo-phosphates, but it saves us money if you return the packaging…) T-shirts are at an all-time premium high. We now have the 'Death' design in black, by popular demand, and a new model in the pipeline which will be produced on hand looms by Jessie Adams in his own personal sweat shop. These will feature a drawing of a class 56 locomotive, head on, traced from an original negative of 56134 at South Dock Shed. Due to the nature of the project, it may not be available mail-order for a while, so come to your nearest Blyth showroom and try one for size (cue advertising jingles etc…)
Litretrary Bit
By the time you read this, the odds are that Mr Porter will have finished writing that monstrous tome which has occupied most of his waking hours for the last four years - apart from the time he's managed to spare to be perfectly beastly to everyone. With the confounded thing finally completed, the plan is to take the manuscript to the British Library to check it through for embarrassing research cock-ups. Joseph is jolly pleased to have been granted a reader's pass, as it has long been his ambition to scrawl badly drawn representations of the male reproductive organ in priceless antique copies of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and the like. Entitled The Bricklayer's Arms, the book weighs in around 275,000 words, and will no doubt lead its author into new and exciting avenues of exploration, in which he will blunder around helplessly, trip over things, and ultimately amass more huge debts without achieving anything. Still - it's better to bat than to bowl, says I.
The Thoughts of Chairman Meeow
It has been a hectic time for our glorious chairman. He's been busy going wrong and copping the most amazing vet's bills. Not content with the abscess and the teeth, his thyroid went into meltdown, resulting in a four day in-patients visit. Just when we were celebrating his complete recovery, one of his legs fell off. No kidding. The illustrious chair developed a blood clot which cut off circulation to number three leg. Only the timely intervention of Comrade Pianist, who whisked him to the vet in time, saved the offending limb. Aspirin did the trick, and now the Chairman is hale, hearty, and on 75mg of DRUGS twice weekly for the rest of his days in this earthly paradise. Thanks to Clive T. Cat for the phone-call, and to all concerned parties who have sent good wishes, support and moved mountains. We will prevail - or even if we don't we'll make out we did anyway, for such is the nature of PROPAGANDA….
Web of Deceit
Drat, it's still there then. We keep hoping that we'll wake up one day and find that the internet doesn't really exist, so we won't be obliged to master the new-fangled technology. Never mind. The Talk City website is partially up and running, although the really juicy bits aren't on there yet. Gabriel the Angel is now in control, and e-mailed me today with news that the rest is going up 'soon'. He's working on it now, and it will be worth the wait. You have to understand that we come from an old-fashioned age of things like 'the wheel', 'the microwave oven' and 'the train', so it's taking a bit longer for us to get frantic about all this website stuff. In the meantime we would like to welcome you to the coming launch of our amazing, and frankly tasteless, Blyth Power Quiz, which will be at all Blyth Power associated websites soon. 100 questions on the band, its work, and its sorry past, with an amazing prize for the highest score. We don't know what the prize will be yet, but we promise it won't be either a used cat or 300 Wild Card EPs. Prizes will be announced in due course. In the meantime, if you want the questions but are one of the billions of people who do not receive e-mail, send an SAE and we'll post a copy. Can you afford to miss out on this amazing experience? Surely not….. Limited copies will also be available from the stall at gigs.
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