…is out, but I’m still getting round to selling it directly using Paypal. Just got to get that sorted out and then the CD will be available straight from this website. Watch this space etc….

I’ll also be making a lot of previously unreleased songs available for download on the site. Again, it’s a mater of time but it should all be up and running soon. This blog was Part 1 of the plan and the stuff I’ve just mentioned is Part 2.

Meanwhile, here’s a copy of the press release I wrote for the CD:

HOT OFF THE PRESS!

“This melody Belongs to you, belongs to me Belongs to no-one.”

“Double Rainbow” – Antonio Carlos Jobim

FITD NEW CD ‘ITS OK TO BE UGLY’ OUT NOW! BUYING DETAILS HERE IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS

It’s Ok to be ugly. No, really, it is. But it wasn’t always that way.

Adolescence can be the cruellest of times, particularly if you’re unusual in some kind of way. Because the moment you’re discovering the opposite (or, indeed, the same) sex is the precise moment you become most aware of anything that might make you inadequate in their eyes. Teenage angst baby.

To be brought up in a society that continually worships a plastic (surgery) enforced idea of beauty is to have your own (mirrored, perceived, imposed) failings thrown at you with words shouted loud… these people are a perfection to strive for, only you’ll never get there, ergo: YOU ARE INADEQUATE, OK?

It could be looks, it could be money, it could be values. It could be your opinions on the endless war on other animals or the endless war on other humans.

Punk rock was and is an escape from those, and other, imposed values – a tunnel to follow the white rabbit down into a world through the looking glass peopled by people who accept you as you are, and thereby allow you to accept yourself as you are. It’s a form of healing, and music is but one of its medicines.

Despite – or because of – not being 3 chord thrash, this is most definitely a punk rock record. It doesn’t play by the rules – punk had no rules to play by: only to run away from ‘isms’ – isms only gave you other rules, whilst punk gave you back you and the right to be yourself. The obvious first thing to do after that is to thank it and then ditch any punk rules people may try to invent. Anything else is misunderstanding.

Or maybe I’m lying. You decide.

“Hey Alice, where’s your wonderland?” started the first Flowers record. The rest of our output was an attempt to answer that first line, as indeed has been the rest of my life.

This CD is an anthology of Flowers In The Dustbin, which is in turn a record of that. FITD exist to express an uncensored sense of self and increase the possibilities and fragments by a factor of one – that is enough in itself….

If the music touches you then all the better. I hope it does.

Gerard Evans. FITD. London / Paris / Lodz. 2007

What happens when an anarchist musician , Craig High and his partner Kiran swap their lives and lifestyles for that of a rich polo club owner and property developer…!?

This…

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=686989691&channel=219646953

More here and here

Gordon does not accept requests from bands.

Shame.

Live slow,
Die old,
And leave a good-looking garden.

from here:

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/suporting_sir_s.html

Supporting Sir Salman

This, of course, is an outrage and must be met with militancy rather than understanding:

Sir Salman Rushdie, the author, was facing fresh threats to his life yesterday following his knighthood.A senior minister in the Pakistani government said that the decision was a justification for suicide bombing, after the parliament in Islamabad condemned the honour as “blasphemous and insulting” to the world’s Muslims.

As Pakistani MPs issued a demand for the award to be immediately withdrawn, the religious affairs minister, Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, said: “The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions [giving Sir Salman a knighthood] are the root cause of it. If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified.”

The least of the observations to be made about these remarks is that Pakistan’s religious affairs minister has nicely demonstrated the hypocrisy of maintaining that “explanation” of the urge to terrorism – the weaselling that finds extenuating circumstances for terrorists’ anger – is neatly to be distinguished from incitement. But I’m less concerned about this rabble-rousing, bonehead bigot than I am about a notion more insidious and quite ubiquitous. Note that the report continues:

The parliament passed a unanimous resolution deploring the honour as an open insult to the feelings of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, the minister for parliamentary affairs who tabled the motion, said that the knighthood was “a source of hurt for Muslims” and would encourage people to “commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad”.

It is astonishing how easily, and how loudly, those who claim to be offended make the illegitimate further claim that their mental state entitles them to restitution. Yesterday I watched on Channel 4 News an interview with the Labour peer Lord Ahmed; exhibiting analytical feebleness combined with blustering inarticulacy, he proffered the same assumption. In the current issue of Index on Censorship I have a piece (reproduced here) on why respecting the beliefs and feelings of others is a lethal affectation in public policy. Legislating to protect people’s feelings is pernicious in principle and dangerous in practice – I take the idle course of quoting myself:

The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt – but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process. Consider Voltaire’s Candide, or H L Mencken’s reports – saturated in contempt for religious obscurantists who opposed the teaching of evolution in schools – on the Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.It is inevitable that those who find their deepest convictions mocked will be offended, and it is possible (though not mandatory, and is incidentally not felt by me) to extend sympathy and compassion to them. But they are not entitled to protection, still less restitution, in the public sphere, even for crass and gross sentiments. A free society does not legislate in the realm of beliefs; by extension, it must not concern itself either with the state of its citizens’ sensibilities. If it did, there would in principle be no limit to the powers of the state, even into the private realm of thought and feeling.

The proper response to those who find themselves offended by the expression of ideas is: “That’s tough. You’ll live. Get over it.” This would be true even if the ideas were stupid and their utterer crass. It would apply to Sir Salman Rushdie if he were a hack writer with the sensibilities of the late Bernard Manning. But he is in fact a writer of outstanding literary gifts and also a heroic (I don’t use the term lightly) defender of freedom of expression. The resolution of the Pakistani legislature is an ignorant and inflammatory intrusion into our civic affairs. I am not impressed with the response to it to date.

The last thing we should do is accept the terms in which religious obscurantists seek to frame this issue. I was appalled to see on the News not only the bonehead Lord Ahmed’s insults against Sir Salman and the government that rightly recommended the honour, but emollient remarks by the British High Commissioner in Pakistan, Robert Brinkley (who has this morning been summoned by Pakistan’s government). The honour was not, the High Commissioner said, an insult to Islam, for we respect Islam.

The first part of that answer was correct but strictly irrelevant. The second was improper. I take fierce exception to (I am – if you will – offended by) a British diplomat’s speaking on behalf of my country and my government in taking a position on matters of religion. I do not respect Islam (or any religious faith). All I will insist upon as a matter of right for Muslims (or Christians, Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists) is religious liberty. Beyond that, they have no claim. They are not entitled to my respect. As a mere lobby group, they have no right to be listened to, let alone taken seriously, on matters of public policy.

In the meantime, our side – those who defend the values of a free society – will make ourselves heard, and because our ideas are worthy of respect we won’t be cowed by religious bigotry. A stiffer diplomatic response is called for. At a minimal and trivial level, it is also time for democratic political parties to take a stand. In the original Rushdie affair, the Labour Party – which I mention specifically because I am on the Left – failed as abjectly as Mrs Thatcher’s government and the first President Bush. Some Labour MPs called for Sir Salman’s novel The Satanic Verses to be banned (the ridiculous Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester East, was the most prominent). I suggest that Lord Ahmed – who had the audacity and stupidity to compare Sir Salman’s knighthood to support for suicide terrorism, both responses being, in his phrase, “uncalled for” – be informed retrospectively of his unamicable divorce from the Labour whip. It’s a small gesture, but even those were lacking when Sir Salman was threatened by a foreign tyrant. He merits our support and admiration.

 Bernard Manning is dead. This is political correctness gone mad!

“Bernard Manning died in hospital earlier today. His condition was described as ‘satisfactory’.”

Peter Cook, So It Goes, Granada TV, 1976

A couple more books about anarcho punk are due out in the future – Texas based Lance Hahn of the band J Church is writing a big one:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=160019640

Whilst UK based Richard Cross is writing one concentrating on the political side of the movement. This has stirred up a bit of a debate with AlistairLivingstone from the Puppy collective:

http://greengalloway.blogspot.com/2007/06/punk-hippies-dont-wear-black.html

It’s good to see anarcho punk getting the exposure it deserves after all this time.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=160019640

Is live art best performed by the young? Certainly punk made me think so. The first FITD incarnation stopped in 1987, when I was the grand old age of 24!

It was watching a show by performance artist Marisa Carnesky that persuaded me otherwise – that there was more to acheive on a stage than an attempt at adulation.

Now I’ve come across another artist who seems interesting in the same way. Like Marisa, Ursula Martinez may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least there’s a point to her putting on a show.

The one daily ritual that keeps me sanest is walking my two wonderful dogs in our (also wonderful) local park every day. Particularly at this time of year — spring — when the various cycles of nature are at their most lively and colourful. Life explodes into a glorious celebration of itself and you can’t help but join in. All the local dog walkers do — I know because we talk about it. We talk. Like you do.

Of course, there are other people in the park as well, at least when the weather is good. A cold rainy Tuesday in February doesn’t exactly bring them out in their droves, but any sunny Sunday will find the part-timers out. They unwittingly introduce a two-tier system because they are completely unaware of the etiquette that has built up. But that’s fine. Especially when it’s sunny and just walking is a treat. The dogs forage excitedly in perpetual optimism — my Ollie enthusiastically walks over to sniff a bush for unknown answers…

And then, hungover and haunted, she leaps out of those same bushes and back into my memory, where she has been squatting and agitating ever since she left in the early 90s. ‘One day you’ll write a book about me and be famous’ she said once as we lay in bed, the clear inference being that she wouldn’t be around to share it. And she won’t. And I won’t. At least, I think not.

We all say hello to each other, the dog walkers. I, and others, take this further and say hello to everyone. The varying responses are eye-opening: often the non-dog people just stare at the floor as they approach: the body language screaming that they don’t want any communication. The Situationist inside feels completely (and tragically) vilified in the notion that alienation has got this far — that once-normal human friendliness has become something the vast majority have started to consider unusual behaviour. An alien nation stuck inside our nuclear families watching telly and disassociated from our neighbours to the point where we don’t even consider them potential friends.

And you, you’re reading this on a computer screen rather than talking to your neighbour or making love with them or rowing with them. And me, I’m writing this instead of the same. Communication breakdown, it’s always the same.

Always the same: I can’t talk about her in more than riddles because the truth is too enormous and too heavy and stuff like that only happens to someone else. In this case, me. She became unmentionable to my friends and I became the one who mentioned her less and less because I didn’t want to unnerve people I liked.

The strangest communication breakdown is when I say ‘morning!’ loud and clear to people who ignore the idea that it’s even happened. For all my disabilities, I will never be that disabled. They don’t just fail to reply, they panic a visible, pathetic, inner panic — the grief without the pang. They squirm, and all because they’ve been offered the olive branch of a friendly passer-by with a smile. And you feel like love is dead.

But then dogs remind you this could never be the case. It’s a great leveller, walking a dog. You become entwined in a pseudo-community that knows few normal barriers but constructs wildly different others. I talk with judges and football hooligans, fools and kings. And we maintain a strange distance… in some ways we know each other’s deepest feelings, but we rarely know each other’s names. I am Muttley & Ollie’s owner / dad — it’s all anyone needs, or desires, to know.

Then people you see most days for maybe years suddenly don’t come anymore. Marion, where are you? Heart-surgery woman? Retired teacher? Jamaican lecturer? Fleet’s mum? Where? Why?

You wonder what has happened. Are they dead? Is the dog dead? Have they moved house? Or just started going somewhere else? All of the above have doubtless been the case in my experience and I dare say all of the above have been thought about me when I’ve left areas.

Where have the glorious possibilities gone? They’re where they always were — right in front of you — just a brave decision away. All the wondrous experiences we might make of life if we weren’t so shit-scared of life itself: if we didn’t accept the false rules and false boundaries and suddenly returned to our natural state.

She left. And in amongst the chaos-mosaic-like thoughts that flutter through my oft-hungover mind during the solitude of my daily stroll, she returns often. She is in the birdsong and the wind blowing the reeds. Mostly, she is in me. Hungover? Yes, she hangs over me.