#TOYLAND TOURS 2 GIVE IT UP FOR TOYLAND TOURS 2

[toylandtours]

rip the alton towers dungeon welcome back toyland tours (i am booed of the stage)

[hee-blee-art]

part 3 of the new postman — time to go see the city!

[ <- part 2 ] [ directory ] [ part 4 -> ]

[ID: Two greyscale comic pages of a cartoony toyland.

Basil, a black and white cat marionette, is talking to Sir Alfred, a nutcracker doll. Basil hands Alfred an envelope with Alfred’s name written on it in cursive. 

A: Oh! This is Gertie’s handwriting… 

[Alfred opens and reads the letter:

Dear Sir Alfred,

I am running off with a charming young lad I met at Bingo. His name is Francois and he’s made of the smoothest plastic I’ve ever felt. Seriously, I can’t keep my paws off him. Anyway, we’re off to the sea. Please let the folk know and orientate my replacement. The postal service should send one along promptly.

Best wishes, 

Postwoman Gertie ]

A: Ah, I… see… well I guess that clears that up then. Huh.

B: Something wrong?

A: No, no, it seems all is well, it’s just… well, Gertie’s been the postwoman for Toyhouse Corners for as long as I can remember. I’ll miss her. But! No use ruminating on what can’t be changed. Gertie’s letter requested I orientate her replacement, so I suppose I’ll be giving you the grand tour!

B: [hesitant] Ah… goodie…

A: This way, New Postman Basil! I suppose we’ll start on Main Street.

end ID.]

[nutterwithasolderingiron]

so. let’s talk about tramp stamps seriously.

this has been a topic on my mind since my friend first sent me one of their tiktok videos saying “lol, look at this cringe” and indeed, it was cringe. next i started seeing more and more videos about how bad they were and how much astroturfing they were doing on social media to get attention. when this level of astroturfing goes on, it’s most people’s first response to look into things deeper. and there we found problematic tweets, cringe lyrics, cousin loving cousin, dr. luke and much much more. during this time, i seen a few people saying “oh, you only hate these guys because your a sexist fuckhead” even when women and queer folk were criticizing them.  then they came to tumblr..... and left tumblr 5 hours later. then the stans started doing what they do best. seeing how some of the stans have responded to the release of the new record, this is going to be me “mansplaining” or whatever. this is me explaining what i see the 2 major problems people have with tramp stamps.  the woke aspect the most common complaint i seen with the tramp stamps was their politics and almost co-opting left wing talking points without any understanding or nuance on the situation at best. this is why people dislike the whole “girlboss” thing. not because they are sexist, but because it’s often invoked in “fuck everyone, i can do this because i’m a badass bitch” which is really just the middle class millenial version of a karen. at worst, some of their lyrics are problematic. need i bring up the lyric about her drunk boyfriend not getting it up? if you don’t know what’s problematic about that, think of her intent in the situation, now picture the genders reversed? yeah. 

the “authenticity” aspect. 

this is the one i feel more inclined to talk about. i’ve been a part of the punk/post-hardcore/emo scene since i was in my teens. i’ve played in a lot of local bands, ran shows, social media accounts, street teams, repaired guitars, pulled sound for 15+ years. now, in these scenes, there can be some gatekeeping BUT usually that attitude gets called out. i’ve had afab bandmates get heckled like crazy and in those situations, we’d pull a kathleen hanna and escort the fuckers out the venue. so what i say when i bring up this next part is not “gatekeeping” it’s just how the scene works and has always worked. 

these scenes foster a community based on authenticity and the attitude of having to grind to get results. most the all time great bands in the rock/punk/metal/hardcore/emo/post-hardcore had to grind but also come across as authentic, you gotta network, you gotta send out hundreds of demo’s. spend thousands on recording, touring, merch, promotion. you know what a 20 year old ford transit with 6 people in the back, all of which have not showered in 2 weeks? i do. most bands know it’s all about luck and connections and grinding, but they still do it. 99% of your favorite rock bands had to do it.  my chemical romance? yup, i remember them on their first uk tour.  green day? part of the gillman punk scene. fallout boy? pete wentz was in the vegan straight edge scene. 

what people are objecting to is the tramp stamps using their connections before they’ve even really played a gig or tried immersing themselves in the scene and tried making connections. the felt fake from the very beginning. “oh but marissa did grind at her publishing job” maybe, i dunno what her job really was. but the point is, it felt very fake, it felt like there was astroturfing. it didn’t feel like 3 girls who wanted to make this music they wanted, it felt like marketing folk at her publishing job said “hmmmmm, the whole e-girl/tiktok/pop-punk revival is going well, how do we jump on this band wagon?” and people seen it for what it was. 

so, tramp stanz or whatever your fanbase is called. before you call me a sexist asshole, i’m going to give you some homework. i’m going to list a few great bands with a strong female creative voice (even if they’re not the singer), my tastes tend to lean a bit weirder so i’m sorry in advance. listen to these, not all of them are all female bands since i often feel separating female/afab musicians from male/amab doesn’t create a good scene.  patti smith (often considered to be the godmother of punk) bikini kill (remember when tramp stamps would hashtag riotgrrl everything? bikini kill were the band that coined the term)  bratmobile (same vein as bikini kill)  jack off jill/scarling (if there’s such a thing as a musician i’d simp for, it would be jessicka addams)  babes in toyland (some super noisy girl grunge) l7 (heavy alt-rock/grunge with some super catchy hooks)  slant 6 (what kind of monster are you is a fucking freight train of a song) hole (as much as we make fun of courtney love’s shit stirring, she could write some of the best choruses ever)  unwound (my favorite band and their drummer sara is the fucking heart of the band)  rolo tomassi (eva spence’s voice will blow your socks clean off) distillers (brody dalle is a fucking queen and you can’t convince me otherwise) against me (transgender dysphoria blues is an album that makes me tear up everytime i hear it but in a good way)

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: His Name Is Alive

While Warren Defever’s name is perhaps less recognizable than that of his band His Name Is Alive, he’s also been connected with a seemingly endless array of other projects: Princess Dragon-Mom, Elvis Hitler, ESP Beetles, Control Panel, and far more. This doesn’t get into his recording and production credits for the likes of Michael Hurley, Iggy and the Stooges, and Mdou Moctar. Forever associated with Michigan’s weirdo-underground music scene, Defever has recently been issuing a series of long-buried recordings as His Name Is Alive. In February, the Disciples label released Hope Is a Candle, the third and final volume in the "Home Recordings" trilogy exploring Defever's teenage tape experimentation as well as A Silver Thread (Home Recordings 1979 - 1990), a four-volume collection of many of Defever’s solo home recordings prior to His Name Is Alive releasing their debut album Livonia on 4AD in 1990. In his review of A Silver Thread, Tim Clarke writes “For a collection of home recordings, what’s most striking about this music is how fully realized and carefully executed it sounds, comparable at times to contemporary artists such as Grouper, Benoît Pioulard and Tim Hecker. This is not the 1980s that I remember.”

Defever gives us his “What Else Is New” list, a set of personal snapshots, memories of a life spent in music, warning the reader that “the descriptions don’t always have an obvious correlation to the video, but welcome to my nightmare brain.”

In The Line of Fire

I started performing when I was five. My grandfather was a self-taught musician from Saskatchewan in Western Canada and he showed me and my brothers how to play banjo, guitar and fiddle. One of my earliest memories is having a full size 127 lb. accordion placed onto my lap and my grandmother voicing her disappointment when I refused to play. I did learn slide guitar from her later though. I have many, often terrible, memories of performing at square dances with his band and we would play old timey country music, folk songs, polkas and waltzes. There were also gigs at the trailer park, old folks homes and a convent. Although my grandfather believed that popular music died with Hank Williams in 1953, he still found room in his heart for Lawrence Welk and Slim Whitman.

Meet Me By The Water

By age ten I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brothers LP collection played at the wrong speeds. I recently found the cassette, Echo Lake (1983) which features waves crashing onto the beach on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair but it was recorded right after I got an echo pedal so it’s got a heavy dose of dreamy delay. Tape loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway would be repurposed a few years later as rhythm tracks on the first His Name Is Alive LP, Livonia (4AD, 1990). Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s had totally insane radio and one of the highlights was Met-Ezzthetics, a late night show on WDET hosted by Faruq Z. Bey who also played saxophone in Griot Galaxy. Shortly before his death he played with His Name is Alive and we had a chance to formalize our student-teacher relationship.

Search For Higher Energies

In high school I was studying Bach Chorale harmonization and counterpoint during the day but recording and touring with the band Elvis Hitler at night. The other guys in band were older but at 16 I was a familiar sight at shitty Detroit punk clubs and Hamtramck dive bars, the nerdy teenager reading a book or doing homework sitting at the bar waiting ’til midnight or 1am for our slot to play our hellbilly hits, “It’s A Long Way From Berlin To Memphis,” and “Hot Rod To Hell.” I was still trying to make sense of the post 1953 music scene and when I met the guy with a giant afro and shiny super hero outfit complete with shiny cape I had no idea he was Rob Tyner of the MC5. We released three records before I was twenty one and played shows and toured with Devo, the Dwarves, the Dead Milkmen, Reverend Horton Heat, the Beat Farmers, Helios Creed, Babes In Toyland, the Cro-Mags, Corrosion of Conformity, the Frogs, the Gories, Pussy Galore, the Unsane and way more I can’t remember I was just a kid. It was some kind of education.

You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here

When I signed with 4AD I thought I was a composer and they let me write my own bio, so I called His Name Is Alive the work of a “fucked up, irresponsible teenage composer.” I had only been writing music for three years. When I heard “Tom Violence” by Sonic Youth I thought for the first time in my life, “I think I could do that.” In 1988 I made a mixtape with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, Leadbelly and some of Big Star’s third album and I tried to arrange it like it was an album, then I made my own album in that same shape, it was called I Had Sex With God and I sent it to 4AD. Our first album contained three of the first five pieces of music I had ever written. Within a few years I was playing festivals for contemporary classical composers and new age artists who were thirty or forty years older than me. His Name Is Alive played the Musicas Visuales Festival in Mexico with Harold Budd, Paul Horn and Jorge Reyes. The mayor of the city presented me with a guitar but then dramatically walked out of the theater during our performance realizing he had made a terrible mistake. I remember the surreal moment when from across the room Harold Budd walked in and greeted me as “Mr. Defever.” He had a cold and was sniffling during his set, the audience thought he was crying. I recorded his show and when I got back home to Livonia I added my own guitar to some of his songs and then edited the tapes, looping my favorite parts and editing out the parts I didn’t like, also adding additional layers of reverb and echo. More recently I did a concert in a five hundred year old temple in Japan where the unamplified meditation music never rose above a whisper and the monk had to turn off the furnace because the heat molecules were too loud. The show was recorded and released under the name Mountain Ocean Sun and features Ian Masters and Hitoko Sakai.

Energy Dealer

Both my parents were born in Canada, my mother in Saskatchewan, my father in Ontario. I have dual citizenship as my father was American and my mother had Canadian citizenship. I spent summers, holidays and weekends in a tiny cottage on Lake St. Clair that did not have a telephone and had curtains instead of doors separating the two rooms. Myrt Fortin who lived next door would receive phone calls for my mom, walk over to our place and yell into the window, “Hey wake up your ma, your dad’s on the phone.” My mom took a lot of naps, so she was always asleep when something important was happening. I remember always getting cut on broken glass while swimming in the lake or getting stabbed by one of the neighbors and having to go wake up my mom to take me to the hospital.

Lord I Don’t Believe You Exist

When I was ten my parents sat me down and told me it was time that I got a summer job. There were only two businesses in town, a gas station and a hardware store so I walked up to the hardware store and asked the owner for a job and immediately fell to the ground crying. Completely fell apart. He asked me why I wanted to work in hardware. I didn’t know what to say, I was only ten but I knew not to tell the owner that his store was stupid and I didn’t think he could handle the truth. It turned out he also owned the gas station so that didn’t really work out. Later that summer, I began working for the Pickseed Corporation as corn de-tasseling season was just beginning. All the moms would drop off their kids in the church parking lot in Tecumseh, just outside of Windsor, around 4:30am where an unmarked windowless cargo van was waiting that had cinderblocks and 2'x4' boards instead of benches so they could squeeze in the maximum amount of children. There were three job requirements to work in a cornfield, the child (it was only children, no adults) needed to show up with a baseball hat, a thermos with water and a large black plastic garbage bag. I think this was before sunglasses were invented. Upon arriving at the cornfield, we were separated into pickers and checkers, younger kids each taking a row of corn (a row could extend a mile or more) and a slightly older kid would organize and manage several of the younger kids. In the morning we were instructed to poke two arm holes and a head hole into our garbage bags and put it on like a raincoat because the corn was covered in dew and kids wearing wet clothes would walk slower than dry kids. So almost every day there was a point, usually around 11am when the dew would dry and we would be roasted alive from the summer sun coming down on our ridiculous shiny black plastic outfits. We worked from sun up until sun down. I received three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. For all you city folks, corn is planted in alternating rows of types of corn so that when the top part of the plant is removed, or “de-tasseled,” it can seed or cross-pollinate easily. It’s a terrible job with a high turnover rate and every day I would hear the sound of kids in nearby rows that had given up hope, sat down in the middle of the field and crying for hours. The following year, at age 11, I was promoted from picker to checker, and was put in charge of a group of about ten sixteen year old’s.

Sleep It Off

Mostly I like to record – His Name is Alive has over a hundred releases and I’ve done another fifty records under various names, Control Panel, Warren Michael Defever, ESP BEETLES, ESP SUMMER, Forest People, Infinity People, Jeepers Creepers, Layla al-Akhyaliyya, Mirror Dream, Princess Dragon-Mom, the Dirt Eaters, the Fishcats, the Whales, plus way more I can’t remember probably because the names were so dumb. I’ve recorded about four hundred records for other bands at my house or other studios. I’ve worked on records with Danny Kroha, Ida, Fred Thomas, Elizabeth Mitchell, Wild Belle, Michael Hurley, and when I was a teenager I helped record the first Gories album which was especially unique as I was the junior assistant engineer who helped move their equipment into the dirt floor garage next to the studio where it was decided the acoustics would be way worse. Also, I helped collage about a hundred Destroy All Monsters tapes from the 70s for a couple of their releases which led to remastering a bunch of tapes from the John Sinclair White Panther Party archives. I’ve done remixes for Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono and when Iggy and The Stooges started touring again I got a phone call from Ron Asheton seeing if I would help them record demos for their reunion album with Mike Watt on bass. They wrote the songs together while they were recording in Niagara’s basement sort of simultaneously. Iggy didn’t have a notebook with all his lyric ideas, instead he just sang about whatever happened that day – one song was about the airline losing his luggage, one about ATM machines and another was about reading in a newspaper that Ray Davies of the Kinks had been shot in New Orleans. In the end they weren’t terribly excited by my suggested song titles including “No Shirt” (you know because it’s like “No Fun” plus you know Iggy never wears a shirt) and they didn’t seem to love the mixes that I did that sounded kind of like those crappy Raw Power bootlegs.

Cost Of Living

Two summers ago I recorded an incredible concert by Mdou Moctar live at Third Man Records in Detroit. They’re wild hypnotic Hendrix style jammers who live in the desert. The band didn’t speak much english but I think I was able to communicate to them how excited I was about their amazing fingerpicking and hot guitar solos after the show by screaming and replaying the best solos over and over again and then screaming the word fuzz and pointing at their fingers. It’s insane and having seen them a few times since then with a different drummer and the addition of a bass player, I’m convinced it’s their best album. It’s wild but it’s still not Tchin-tabaraden wedding wild.

Licked By Lions

Jonathan Richman walks into Ethan and Gretchen's studio and asks if I can remove all the rugs, take the acoustic treatments off the walls and strike the baffles which normally separate the instruments, drums and amps, so the room will have the most echo possible, he has also invited about ten friends including Johnny Bee Badanjek the drummer from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Mary Cobra from the Detroit Cobras to dance, sing and play percussion in the studio while he records. He has two vocal microphones set up at either end of the room and has brought his own microphones for the drums along with his own desired placement for them. He notices a tamboura near the control room and asks if I know how to play it or if I know how to tune it. Within seconds he’s tuned it and proceeds to sing Indian classical music accompanying himself on tamboura drone for about thirty five minutes. It’s beautiful and very surprising. He asks me if I recorded it, I lie and say no. Later he asks me not to play it for anyone. We record for hours. Some songs are quite long – ten and fifteen minutes, some are medleys of oldies or soft rock hits from the seventies segueing into new songs of his. It’s a confusing session as it’s not clear when songs are starting and ending and he often plays guitar and sings nowhere near a microphone. The distance between him and the microphone seems to have some meaning, there’s some formula to when he chooses to walk away in the middle of a verse but I am unable to determine the secret code. At the end of the session three or four songs are deemed usable, edited and mixed, although, sadly, an attempt at a completely insane and unexpected fuzz guitar solo is left unreleased. (The Harold Budd piece is at the opposite end of this spectrum.)

Calling All Believers

Shortly after Tecuciztecatl was released, I received an email from Dr. James Beacham at CERN inviting us to perform at a series of concerts that would combine experimental music with experimental science at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He didn’t contact our booking agent, which would be how we generally receive offers for gigs, instead he sent an email to me, which would be how we generally receive crazy messages from our completely insane fans (murderous, delusional, poetic, threatening messages usually). I assumed the invitation was fake or a prank and replied that we would prefer to wait until they had successfully opened a pathway to interspatial dimensions and we’d play on the other side or that if that was unlikely to happen at a convenient time then perhaps we could set up our equipment right on the edge of a mini-black hole and perform as the Earth is being destroyed so we could release the concert film “Live At The End Of The World.” After a few messages back and forth, it was clear that he was legit and I apologized for being such a jerk. Soon I discovered poetry within the language of particle physics as well as a certain beauty in the idea that these scientists have devoted their lives to dreaming, searching and discovering basic principles that connect all things in existence. The song “Calling All Believers” refers to this devotion. “Energy Acceleration” compares the scientists to monastic life in medieval times and mystics trying to find and define the line between this world and the next and at the same time invoking the incredible amounts of energy needed to create the collisions experiments. The Patterns of Light LP was released in 2016 on London London Records and is about interpreting visions of light, trying to find universal truth with whatever tools available, it’s about the search for how everything works, why it works and how it got that way but also about being inspired on a basic level by the way a thing looks and how all your senses take in a thing. A thousand years ago Hildegard Von Bingen was writing about this same thing in letters, songs, medical texts, and had even developed her own language to use in her mystical writings, similar to Magma drummer Christian Vander using his own language for their concept albums or French black metalists Brenoritvrezorkre and Moëvöt.

The Light Inside You

We get a lot of letters from fans, mostly weirdos though. I think it started when we released Song of Schizophrenia, that sort of connected us to a certain demographic I suspect. Here’s a recent typical message we received. “Growing up in Panama City, Mouth By Mouth and Livonia were like passages to other realms. I drank a ton of cough syrup at the time but those albums helped make life more livable. I was about to go to art school for sculpture and graphic design and the textures I heard on those records had actual shapes to them. Most music I knew at that time was flat or linear. I got them on cassette via mail-order from an ad placed in a bmx magazine. Mouth By Mouth arrived just before going to work at the amusement park and I was able to listen to it twice on the way thanks to the never-ending beach traffic. As luck would have it, I worked on “The Abominable Snowman” ride, basically a tilt-a-whirl inside a dome with lots of fog machine action, blue lights, mirrors, and lots of air conditioning. It took about 10 listens that day before it wasn’t as weird as when I first put it on. Maybe it was my bubblegum flavor/robitussin combo slushie on top of no-doz that pulled it all together, but it was probably a weird ride for a lot of vacationing beach tourists and townies when all they really wanted to hear was “Naughty by Nature” by O.P.P. I had no business running those rides at the age of 17 but I really loved how disorienting that ride could be with all the mirrors, the fog, the cold and for the final 90 seconds the ride would go in reverse. I had a buddy named Kevin that did acid at work and would repeatedly run the mini-train off the tracks and all the riders had to walk back through the woods for about a half mile that summer.”

[mapguide-blog]

Alton Towers: New attractions for the 2019 season

This season isn’t going to be a big one, after the huge investment of Wickerman in 2018. However, we are getting 2 new attractions. The first obviously being the Alton Towers Dungeon, which is rumoured to be in the building where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was. The second new attraction is currently under the name ‘Project Hip Hop’, two junior drop towers in CBeebies Land, located between Tree Fu Tom Training Camp and Mr. Bloom’s Allotment.

So, the Alton Towers Dungeon; thoughts on this attraction are very mixed. Some are glad to see the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory building being put to use; others doubt that this attraction will live up to its predecessors, including ‘Toyland Tours’, a generally beloved and well received attraction. It’s also been speculated that, like the Warwick Castle Dungeons, this attraction will be an extra charge. This theory was further pushed with the release of the ‘Premium Alton Towers Season Pass’ which granted a free dungeons trip with every visit (more on this annual pass in another post). What we know about the dungeons currently is very limited. We know that it will be based on the history of Staffordshire/Alton Towers and that, again like Warwick Castle, it’s designed for guests age 10 and up. While I think it’s fantastic that there’s a new attraction for the children who are too old for CBeebies but not ready for the bigger coasters, it is a shame that it’s probably going to be a paid attraction. As this attraction will be very actor based, it’s fair to assume that it will be an extra charge. However, it will be interesting to see how well this attraction does, a trip to Alton Towers will already cost a family of 4 booking in advance around £130, not including food, drink and merchandise; if the dungeons cost the same as the Warwick Castle dungeon (£9pp), this is an extra £36, which can make an already expensive family day out even more so. Not to mention, there is plenty to do outside of the dungeons, will people see the value in a paid attraction?

I think it’s also important to mention that this may become part of the lineup for events such as Santa Sleepovers, festive breaks and Pirate and Princess week, with it being an attraction more like Extraordinary Golf or the Waterpark. This will obviously add another fun activity and may help families find more value in these expensive stays. I find it hard to believe that this will be a draw to the park, just another thing to do if you get a voucher, much like the now defunct Tree Top Quest.

Now, Project Hip Hop! Personally, I think this was a good investment for CBeebies land, it’s consistently a busy area of the park and having two relatively high capacity junior drop towers will be a good way to soak up the crowds. I don’t think they placed these new drop towers in the best place however. Personally I think they would have been better placed at the food kiosk near Spinball Whizzer, as an expansion to the very tired looking Adventure Land, but I also think that if Spinball Whizzer is going to come down soon anyway, adding to the area wouldn’t really make sense. With the addition of these new drop towers though, what is going to happen to frog hopper? Personally I don’t think they’ll keep it there and I’m hoping that they’ll instead reopen Twirling Toadstool, Wobble World and the cafe and just generally clean up Cloud Cuckoo Land a bit, however, this seems very unlikely, this part of the park has effectively been derelict since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was removed. What I actually expect to happen is Cloud Cuckoo Land left as it is for a final year of operation, before being renovated in the next closed season. I only think this because the driving school has only recently come back, so it’ll probably last one more season.

I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on the new rides and attractions coming to Alton Towers in 2019! Please give this a like and send me any requests you have on Merlin Attraction themed blog posts! Thanks!

[chiseltipzine]

“People have been waiting to hear music like ours” - Screaming Toenail Interview

[Photo: Artwork for Screaming Toenail’s 2015 Territorealities EP]

There’s nothing more comforting than reading the words “ANTI COLONIAL BELLIGERENT QUEER SCREAMING PUNK SASSY TOE NAILS” when you randomly click on a band on facebook. London-based SCREAMING TOENAIL are your social justice dream. They confront bigots, colonised minds and general shitness all through a fun accessible jazzy punk sound. You could even potentially play this with your mum present and she wouldn’t tell you to ‘turn that racket off’. It’s a more interesting kind of punk than sheer angry noise. Their music moves around like a giant water slide and you follow it, learn things and just like that you have a new favourite band. With one EP under their belt (Territorealities released in 2015) and the next one due out in just under two weeks, they answered some questions via email on their history, the response to their music, challenging spaces, paying artists, identities and more!

I couldn’t find much background info online about Screaming Toenail (apart from Jacob’s other brilliant work), so will have to start with a more boring question: could you give me a brief rundown of how you all got into making music and how you all crossed paths and formed and named Screaming Toenail? We actually all went to school together, but we didn’t become Screaming Toenail until a couple of years ago. [Guitarist] Niadzi and [singer] Jacob were bunking off school and  writing songs way back in 2005, obsessed with Le Tigre and Gravy Train!! [Drummer] Moon was this mysterious person in the year above, Jacob specifically remembers seeing her walk into a teenage house party and asking each guest, “Are you real?” perfectly in time to this minimal electro track. It was weird but like, very cinematic and musical. Years later Alice ended up banging the drums real good in a shared flat with Jacob. A Screaming Toenail was born in their kitchen as they yelped nonsense at each other. “MOULDY GUTS!” – “BOOTY SCIENCE!” – “*SCREAMING TOENAIL*”  The topics you address in your songs are serious but your music is animated and accessible. Was this deliberate to get your message across more easily or did it naturally fall into place that way? Our first song, Bigots, was a response to the Nicki Minaj song, ‘Looking Ass (Explicit)’ and as such is FULL OF ANGER, but anger directed at problematic white boys. So we are angry and have allot of fun when we are together because making fun of the things we hate is a way of coping with all the incessant  barrage of shit. Also we wanna make music that makes people happy, music that helps other people laugh, dance, survive and enjoy life <3 How have you found the response to your music? It’s been really inspiring to see the overwhelmingly positive response. We get a sense that people have been waiting to hear music like ours, (anti colonial, queer, femme) because we have been waiting for it too. Another really cute thing has been hearing other bands like TFQBMT (Those Fucking Queers Broke My Teeth,) Big Joanie, Xana, Tuffragettes, Dream Nails and Petrol Girls say they are fans of or inspired by our music because we are huge fans of theirs so it makes us feel well special. Political bands who operate in an independent, DIY context are sometimes criticised for ‘preaching to the choir’. Have you ever worried about that? Or do you think that’s inevitable anyway? The audiences at our gigs have always been really amazing, encouraging, supportive. There’s a great community of DIY queer anti establishment bands in  London. Our gigs are usually quite mixed in terms of gender, race, sexuality and age – we are reflecting the voices of people who are also opposed to white cis-hetero patriarchal shit. We don’t really feel like we are preaching – just expressing ourselves and having fun at the same time, hopefully that’ll encourage other people to do the same. Do you think ideas surrounding intersected oppressions are making relatively good progress? Both in music scenes and generally-speaking across the left. Maybe visibility is a tiny bit better but in short No. Absolutely fucking not, the music industry is fucked. People of colour, queers, women and other marginalised groups need to be paid better and given more platforms in every facet of our society. So in a way we do operate within an echo chamber and we are still looking for ways to break out. We are encouraged by acts like the internet, Xana, Big Jonie, Young Fathers, Cakes The Killer, L1ef, Mykki Blanco, and countless artists who are challenging so called norms and taking up space in predominantly white, cis, male straight scenes.  When I first saw your Territorealities EP was £5 on your bandcamp, I thought that was slightly expensive for a download, but then thought about the importance of what you are doing as artists and realised it’s definitely worth it. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe Jacob does all the artwork for the band. Have you always done visual art and music together or did one come first? And do you think there’s a problem with artists being underpaid? We think a fiver is pretty good value for five tracks considering all the work that went in to writing, rehearsing, recording and mixing our songs and we hope you’d get a priceless amount of joy out of listening to it ;) We rented a studio to record the EP and were hoping to break even! Yes there’s definitely a problem of artists being underpaid – and often not paid at all! You can listen to our demos for free on sound cloud. Jacob is an illustrator and we’re a DIY band so it makes sense that they would do our artwork.  A question for your guitarist Niadzi  – I really love your style, what sort of influences inspired your guitar playing? And can you tell me a bit about your other project Rainbow Corp? Guitar playing – I was inspired to pick up a guitar by Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland – Kathleen Hanna and Kat Bjelland. Seeing them play made me think I could probably do that! Eddie Hazel (Funkadelic) is a big influence, and Jimi Hendrix obviously. These male players came a lot later, it was the women players who actually inspired me to get a guitar. Rainbow Corp is a constant work in progress of exploring being creative for being creative’s sake. The visual art and the music go hand in hand. What would you say to the kind of people who see ‘identity politics’ as overly-labelling and regressive? 1. Eat a dick! 2. Don’t label us. 3. Intersectional identities are not something people choose, we can’t peel our gender away from our sexuality or ethnicity and all those things effect the lives we are able to live, it’s regressive to ignore that fact. As Audre Lorde once said “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Three bands you would happily tour the world with. Le Tigre. Teenage Caveman. XANA!!!! How can we decolonise punk?  Support indigenous bands in colonised countries. Call out racism in punk scenes even if it means creating an uncomfortable situation for white people. Keep on making it. Don’t worry if you have a succinct political message or a “good” singing voice, be patient with yourself and the other poc in your life. Listen to people if they call you out on something like racism, sexism, ableism and remember that we all fuck up sometimes but we can forgive ourselves and do better next time. Encourage everyone everywhere to start a band if they want to and don’t worry if you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing – do it anyway. What can we expect from your next EP and what are your future plans? Lots of musical creatures. Swarms of bees. Undying tardegrades. Cop killing Robot horses… BABIES!!!! Some really cute stuff and some really sad stuff too. More glistening surreal scifi toenails!!!

Screaming Toenail’s next EP, Food Chain, is due out on 11th March with a launch night at DIY Space for London (Facebook event here)

[saadlondon-blog]

Harrods Research Project Essay

The aim of the research project was to push us to involve ourselves in aspects of London life and become experts in our chosen projects. After having explored a number of issues that I thought would be interesting, I decided that Harrods would be an institution that would teach me a lot. Not only about life in London, but also about the economy, history, royal family and the attitudes of people living and working in London; whether they be UK citizens or not. Through this project, I learned a lot about the store itself and the impact it's had on London, the United Kingdom, and even the world.

Among the most notable things that I learned is the fact that Harrods's impact goes as far as it's almost 200 years of existence. What was once a small grocery business, expanded to become the largest retail store in Europe. With such growth came many ups and downs whether they be the store burning to the ground in 1883, or winning a bet against Selfridges in 1917 on who would make the most profit. Nevertheless, the most notable parts of Harrods's story go far beyond it 6 floors, three hundred and thirty departments and thirty-two restaurants.

While learning that they once procured a baby elephant as a gift to Ronald Reagan was interesting and that they once hired a cobra to protect a pair of diamond and ruby shoes was also the type of exciting stuff that people like to talk about. An in-depth look at Harrods reveal its far-reaching impact and place as an institution of London.

To start with Harrods was fairly involved in World War 2, where the store went from selling luxury goods to completely transforming as a producer of Lancaster bombers and military uniforms. Moreover, as a British landmark in its own right, Harrods has also been the sight of two IRA bombings, one in 1983 and the other in 1993. Thus, from the very start, it was clear to me that there was much more to Harrods than its superficial reputation as a store that sells expensive things.

Not that having an average of 100,000 customers walk through your door per day or 300,000 during Christmas is some minuscule feet, but throughout my research, I found that there was much more to talk about. For example, the "Harrods Effect" which is a term conjured up in real estate to describe the changes that happened to the Knightsbridge area due to the presence of Harrods. Where the difference between the price per square foot of a building that is a 5-minute walk away from Harrods and a building that is 20 minutes away can vary by a margin of 561 pounds per square foot. Therefore, it's clear that the presence of this building alone created considerable wealth for individuals who own property in the areas surrounding Harrods.

When conducting my research, it did not surprise me that celebrities and public figures, such as soccer player David Beckham and First Lady Asma Al-Asad were seen as regular customers and visited Harrods frequently to shop and eat. However, what did surprise me was the fact that in the store's efforts to create unique and exciting departments, they became responsible for the inspiration behind a global children's character Winnie the Pooh. Apparently, the author A.A Miline was inspired to create the character after buying a teddy bear from Harrods for his son Christopher Robin.

Moreover, Harrods being Europe's largest retail store has often been looked at as an example of how changes and trends in the economy will impact Britain's consumerism.  Where after Brexit multiple reports showed how the weakening of the British pound has helped increase consumption from overseas, where stores like Harrods experienced an increase in sales of 23.3% and an increase in profits of 38.8%. Thus, the more I researched the more I learned about how Harrods has had a considerable influence in a number of areas.

One aspect I was very excited to look into was the store's connection to the royal family. From the very start, I could see a clear line being drawn between royalty and luxury and as such it was not surprising to me at all that Harrods has had a detailed and heavily documented history with the Royal family. Beyond the fact that it held coveted Royal Warrants and banned the Duke of Edinburgh from ever entering. The relationship between the royals was built on the actions of Harrods's owner at the time Mr. Al Fayed, whose son was in a relationship with Princess Diana and was also killed with her in the 1997 car crash still remembered to this day. Mr. Al-Fayed claims that his son and the princess were engaged and that she was pregnant with his child and that is why the royal family ordered her death. He refused to believe that the deadly car crash was an accident and as such; he had memorials created in his store to commemorate them. Among these memorials, one showing Diana's alleged engagement ring and the other a stature with the engraving innocent victims plastered along the bottom. Thus, it is clear to see that Harrods's legacy will forever be tightly intertwined with the death of the famous Princess Diana and the fact that the memorials in the store are considered to be tourist attractions on their own speaks to Harrods position in Britain.

Beyond what I learned from watching documentaries and reading articles and reports, I was able to better grasp Harrods relationship to London by going there with people from the class as well as people who I met through my community involvement and giving them walking tours. These tours were never of the entire store as that would take a really long time, but focused more on what each group wanted to see. The most popular places we would visit were the Toyland, bookstore and Memorabilia area otherwise known as the Millionaire Gallery. I loved seeing how people would react to everything from the buildings illuminated exterior that's made up of twelve thousand light bulbs to the first edition copy of books, signed albums and huge stuffed animals for sale. It was easy to see why the store is considered a tourist attraction as everyone I took had to take out their phones to take pictures of the outrageous things they would find inside the store as well as the incredible interior and exterior architecture. Moreover, the Knightsbridge subway stop itself had signs leading to Harrods which is a testament to the stores’ prevalence in itself.

My portfolio also includes interviews with Harrods employees who gave me insight that I wouldn't have been able to find online or through my readings. What I learned was that Harrods is as much of a reflection on London as London is on Harrods. Where there were British employees who had worked at the store for the last 30 years despite the changing owners. These employees helped me debunk rumors that Harrods is no longer looked at positively by the British and explained to me how the connections and friendships they made working at the store are what make them such happy employees and what make the store so successful. Moreover, the number of employees from international backgrounds was outstanding, this was something that the store is clearly proud of as each employee has a name tag accompanied by the flag of the country they're originally from. This dedication to diversity as well as the melting pot of people from different cultures working happily together in a store that continues to break records and reach new levels of success every year, is in my opinion what London truly strives to be.

I'd have to say that my entire experience in regards to this project has been very positive. I found myself enjoying the work because I was genuinely interested in learning more about my topic. While I had no specific expectations on what kind of impacts or correlations there were between Harrods and different areas of culture and commerce, I was quite pleased with how much information I was able to find as well as the different ways I was able to articulate these findings whether it be through maps, timelines, newspaper clippings, interviews or pictures.

In conclusion, through this project, I not only learned more about a business but about a British institution. I was able to gain a wealth of knowledge on British history over the last 200 years, the royal family, Knightsbridge area and the British economy to name a few. Through introducing my friends to everything I learned I found myself becoming an expert on London's many faces and by interviewing real Londoners working in this city I was able to form a clear image of what it's like to live here, not only as a tourist or a student but as a local in my own right.