#The Queen of Technicolour

[tina-aumont]

Maria Montez, the Queen of Technicolor, was born the 6th of June 1912 and with her beauty, intelligence and charisma, won the hearts of many people.

It's time to honour her and celebrate her birthday by publishing her page we have here on this site!! Enjoy the reading!! and if you click on the small photos, you'll go to this site specific entries for her!!

And remember that her biography is in FAMILY page, where you'll find her parents, grandparents, siblings and nieces.

Enjoy and celebrate Maria's beautiful birthday today!!

Eleni xxx

[bitter69uk]

“Like [Mario] Lanza, Maria Montez had a reputation for being impossible to handle. After a number of years in Haji-Baba type adventures, she was dropped by Universal and forced to seek work in European cheapies. While in Europe, she attempted to counter her advanced state of avoirdupois with hot saline baths. She died in one of a heart attack at the age of thirty-one.”

/ From the book Flesh and Fantasy (1978) by Penny Stallings /

Died on this day in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes, France: nostril-flaring and tempestuous Queen of Technicolour Exotica, Caribbean Cyclone and leading lady of films like White Savage (1943), Cobra Woman (1944) and Siren of Atlantis (1949), Maria Montez (née María África Gracia Vidal, 6 June 1912 – 7 September 1951). Aside from perhaps the young Yvonne De Carlo, did any woman wear a yashmak with more elan? Note: Stallings gets Montez’s age wrong in the quote above – she was 39 when she died. (Like any self-respecting diva, Montez had a “show biz age”). Montez is entombed in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Who knows at this point if I’ll ever return to Paris, but if I do, I vow to make a religious pilgrimage to Montez’s grave. “When I see myself on the screen, I look so beautiful I want to scream with joy” Montez once famously declared. Maria Montez, you make ME scream with joy! 

[bitter69uk]

Born on this day: golden age Hollywood’s tempestuous high empress of kitsch exotica, nostril-flaring Dominican actress and “Caribbean Cyclone” Maria Montez (née María África Gracia Vidal, 6 June 1912 - 7 September 1951). Venerated by the likes of Gore Vidal and underground queer filmmakers Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, the leading lady of films like Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943), Cobra Woman (1944) and Siren of Atlantis (1949) is a pivotal figure in the sensibility we now call “camp” and one of the original LGBTQIA icons. (Early Warhol drag superstar Mario Montez, for example, was christened after her). And aside from perhaps the young Yvonne De Carlo, did any woman wear a yashmak with more elan? “When I see myself on the screen, I look so beautiful I want to scream with joy” Montez once famously exclaimed. Maria Montez, you make ME scream with joy! Pictured: Montez having her lipstick touched-up during production of Cobra Woman in which she plays - what else? - an evil queen.

Maria Montez

[blu3-ja3]

COD MASTERLIST

I will continue to update this with all my COD posts cause there's a lot now. Everything Underlined is a link to a post of mine.

Character Colors (This is Kinda Important)

141 Headcannons

Age

Scars

Civilian Clothing, Heights, and Ethnicity

Nicknames

Solo Gym Music

O'Connor's Music

09 Price and MacTavish

The Queen

Monster Au O'Connor

O'Connor & Laswell

Summer

Short Stories

Meet Doctor Maevis O'Connor!

Son Shine

Motherhood

Younger Days

Habit

Phobia

Smitten Roach

Meet the Family

O'Connor with the 141

Soap Roach Gaz Ghost Price

Character Art

Maevis O'Connor (Civilian & Tactical)

Civilian 141

My AU (Post MW2 + Roach & Ghosts)

Strength > The Past

Violence > Breaking

Making the Call

1 • 2

Lose It In A Technicoloured Beat (Ghoap AU) Hiatus

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6

[too-sapphic-to-function]

Intro post? Perchance.

Hello there, friends. Tis I, your friendly neighbourhood lesbian. Idk what to say. I’m a teenager? Undiagnosed adhd? They/she? Genderfae?

Fuck im bad at this.

I like Reneé Rapp. A lot. More than a sane person should. She makes me feel gay, and also routinely reminds me that I am in fact neurodivergent whenever I scream because she gets mentioned. I also like mean girls, and sex lives of college girls. Hmmm, I wonder why.

I’m also a massive fucking theatre kid I love musicals they make me so happy. My favourites are:

MEAN GIRLS

six

Dear Evan Hansen

jOsEpH aNd ThE aMaZiNg TeChNiCoLoUr DrEaMcOaT

WICKEDDDD

HEATHERS (how did I forget that when I wrote this I fucking love love love heathers)

I also like to read. Fanfiction. Gay fanfiction. Fanfiction of the wuh-luh-wuh kind.

Oh and also music this is the biggest thing I fucking love music I would catch a Grenade for music I would throw my hand on a blade for music I would jump in front of a train for music you know I would do anything for music… /lyrics.. ish..

My favourite singers/bands are

Renee Rapp

Chappell roan

Billie Eilish

Sabrina carpenter

Olivia rodrigo

Towa bird

Charli xcx

Nessa Barrett

I also like Bruno Mars, ajr, queen, abba, Ed Sheeran, green day, Kesha, Katy Perry, marina, lady gaga and loads more!

I’m so gay. Like so very gay. So insanely gay it couldn’t be more painfully obvious. I want a girlfriend. Badly. This is not a secret. Don’t like this? Get the fuck out.

I can and will scream about Regina George, and Leighton Murray.

Oh shit yeah I like books. Been struggling to read anything but fanfiction for a while but I still love these

Hunger games

Divergent

Shadow and bone

Throne of glass

Hetty feather (my fucking childhood oh my god) + so so so so so many Jacqueline Wilson books

Murder most unladylike

A good girls guide to murder (I love holly Jackson I still need to read five survive though. I am NOT reading the magisterium)

One of us is lying + that fucking pink one Karen McManus did I don’t remember the name but it’s the pink one.

Serpent and dove

…..man what the fuck am I doing with my time no one cares about this shit? Who gives a fuck I’m still writing it.

Anyway, I think that’s it. Congratulations if you actually read this waffle. I don’t know what I’ve done here but I’ve done it. Hope you enjoyed.

SNDJWJZJEJSJXNEJSKDJW GAY

[themaresnest-dumblr]

The Real Reason The Police Split Up

You've probably heard of all the whitewashed stories about how the band and why, at the very point they were in terms of sales the biggest band in the world, they fell apart? Well for those of you who have never saw the following, here it is, in full technicolour.

To give you some background, the band was in the middle of a world tour, yet Sting insisted on them recording miming a song for Kenny Everett's Christmas Special due later that year - Kenny Everett being a DJ with a even more successful sideline running a series of alternative comedy shows. Kenny had been very generous to the band in their earlier days when most mainstream DJs had been lukewarm, and Sting wasn't too big for his boots to feel that they always owed him one, especially as the Christmas Special was to be themed in defence of Everett's naughty humour, which now had him in danger of being what people would call today 'cancelled'. A new controller had taken charge of the BBC, Michael Grade, and was openly reconsidering Everett's entire employment with the corporation.

(In the early 1980s, a combination of what later was deemed 'political correctness' along with an increasingly militant Christian lobby in the UK that had supplanted the tea room tut-tuts of the likes of Mary Whitehouse, was to put a lot of acts reliant on comedy considered lewd or irreverent in serious danger of being finished) To let you know how influential a DJ Kenny Everett was, he was the man largely responsible for turning 'Bohemian Rhapsody' into one of the biggest hits of all time by saturation playing it on his Capitol Radio show, even though Queen's record company EMI said it was too long and listeners 'would get bored'.

However the other two, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, as Americans, really didn't give a toss - as far as they were concerned the band as international superstars had long outgrown needing to be chummy with parochial celebrities.

But the band's manager (and former CIA agent) Miles insisted Sting was right and they must do the show, the UK was a big record market in those days and the vanishing of all their musical peers from the punk/new wave era was a sharp reminder that in a fickle business they always needed to keep their friends close.

It already exacerbated tensions with Copeland and Summers feeling Sting was treating them too much like they were his backing band (The Jam had already split messily earlier that year amid similar circumstances, along with recriminations and legal writs concerning non-payment of royalties by Paul Weller's dad, who just happened to be their manager) and had held back good material for his own solo record project (a charge Sting in turn labelled at both of them)

Thus the stage was set for a bit of a disaster ...

Afterwards, the band completed their world tour by March 1984, but it was clear something had changed, and it came as no surprise to anyone in the UK that, apart from a few charity concerts, some rather awkward appearences at music award ceremonies, and a half hearted meeting about recording new material, they were never to record together ever again.

[merelymatt]

Audio Drama Sunday imagines the future

Killjam: Hail to the Queen, baby

Been waiting for this debut for a while, and it pays off the anticipation! Sexyviolent queer gonzo technicolour grindhouse. The commentators are as OTT as the deathmatch gladiators and I will love each one of them until Faustina Fetamine eviscerates them.

Observable Radio: Large Models

Catching up on this season from a couple of years ago – this episode stands alone as a simple, eloquent and chilling series of vignettes of the future we might be heading to, where everything is language models talking to each other endlessly degrading and loopong...

[addictedgallery]

Get Your Art Fix!

"It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to…'I AM QUEEN." ~ Unknown

"African Queen" by Jamie Nelson, 2019

Series: The Colour Black

Arty-Fact: In this series, Jamie explores colour theory using the contrast between rich black skin tones and technicolour hues.

Jamie uses colour-blocking with clashing tones to create a bold impact. Fluorescent backdrops set the stage, as black skin tones form dynamic negative shapes, creating a silhouette effect.

Known for her love of colour, Jamie uses black skin as the backdrop to colourful pigments and painterly brush strokes. Metallic Sudanese jewellery adorns the skin, for an additional study of texture and dimension.

Using black skin as both the canvas and the brushstroke, Jamie proves that black contains all colour. She illustrates that the colour black is not a negation of colour but rather the colour of beauty.

See It On Your Wall

[mantcdea]

CHARACTER SOUNDTRACK

List some songs that give off the Vibes™️ of your character, whether it’s something they would listen to or just gives that delicious writing and muse inspo!

🪐 AURORA - Cure For Me : This song has a "I'M GONNA DANCE AND BE MYSELF" feel to it that reminds me of Mantis. Besides, Aurora is the singing VC I have for her!

🪐 Oh Wonder - Technicolour Beat : This song is so soft and sweet and endearing, the first time I listened to it I was like... this screams Mantis. It's warm and gentle, hopeful and soothing and it absolutely reminds me of her vibe.

🪐 Madrigal - I Believe In Sunshine : The first words of this song are "she's a sunshine girl" which gave me Mantis vibes on the first listen.

🪐 Gregory & The Hawk - Boats & Birds : This song also gives me big Mantis vibes. The softness of her voice, the gentleness, the cosmic themes... This song is about wanting your loved ones to shine. It's also about parting ways but still remembering them, IDK this is just SO Mantis.

🪐 Sleeping At Last - Touch : This song's theme is physical touch, which is incredibly relevant to Mantis as a character. Touch is the way she connects with the world, the way she uses her powers... The way she shows she cares– *sobs*

🪐 Rosemary & Garlic - I'm Here : THE VIBES of this song are just so Mantis, omg. It's soft, it's sweet, it's comforting and dreamy... Mantis... Mantis?????

🪐 Queen - The Show Must Go On : Oh this song is... insane, and it's insane how well it fits her. Mantis knew that if she made one wrong move, her own father would literally kill her. To Mantis that scenario was not an 'if' but a 'when'. Knowing that the end is near but still being able to maintain hope and courage??? Not being able to physically fly, but saying that your soul is like the wings of butterflies? Dude... I need a moment. *screams for 2 hours straight*

🪐 Paramore - Hard Times : This song has dark lyrics but a very cheerful, upbeat, happy tone. It reminds me of Mantis because she always tries to stay positive, she faces her struggles with optimism even though deep down she's exhausted. But she's not giving up!

🪐 Nathan Wagner - Empath : Self-explanatory. This song is about being deeply compassionate, about being affected by the emotions of others. About being considered weak for it when in truth, there is strength in choosing compassion. So yeah, this song fits Mantis too.

🪐 Ryn Weaver - New Constellations : This song is SO MANTIS OMG. She's a child of the cosmos in the most literal sense of the word. The cosmic theme of this song just... reminds me of her, and also the curiosity, the desire to understand more... This song is beautiful and fitting for her.

stolen from: @asgardianhammer

tagging: THE DASH! YOU! AND YOU! steal it and @ me!

[steventhusiast]

username song game

rules: for each letter of your username put a song. tagged by @scarcrossdlvrs :D

please prepare for the most random list of songs EVER

s - still don’t know my name by labrinth

t - technicolour beat by oh wonder

e - end of beginning by djo

v - valerie by amy winehouse

e - eventually by tame impala

n - never let me down again by depeche mode

t - this is home by cavetown

h - heart to heart by mac demarco

u - under pressure by queen and david bowie

s - satanist by boygenius

i - i know the end by phoebe bridgers

a - animal by troye sivan

s - see you again (feat. kali uchis) by tyler, the creator

t - thnks fr th mmrs by fall out boy

that was harder than i thought it’d be hope you enjoy o7

no pressure tags for a couple peopleee @beep-beep-robin @stobinesque @xenon-demon

[talesofthesecondcity]

Please, Dont Let Me Trip!

I didn’t exactly explode onto Birmingham’s gay scene in glorious rainbow technicolour, more creep apprehensively down a flight of steep stairs… and straight into an awkwardly familiar face!

In my late teens, Friday nights were spent alternating between several pubs on the social triangle of Aston University. I’d been drinking on campus for months prior to turning the legal age, but being student pubs, used to a clientele of fresh-faced undergrads, our spotty faces barely stood out. Doormen would turn a blind eye if you could rattle off your fake date of birth with enough conviction.

On one evening out, I couldn’t shake thoughts of another bar in town, the idea of which ignited my teenage hormones like a drop of blood screaming to a hunting shark. I decisively downed the dregs of my cordial-coloured Snakebite & Black, turned to my best-mate and announced, “I’m going to The Jester.”

The Jester was a basement gay bar, lurking beneath Scala Building, a shabby curve of concrete and glass on Holloway Circus. This typical 1960’s development, of the style old-school Birmingham is notorious, had seen better days, even back in the 80s.

I paced outside for an age, trying to muster the courage to go inside, but somebody would walk by or a bus would circle the roundabout and I would lose my nerve. Finally, the coast was clear and I dashed to the door. The unremarkable entrance took me to a tight flight of stairs leading down into… well, I had no idea.

My heart pounded with a giddy mix of fear and excitement as I descended the steep stairs. All I could think was, Please, don’t let me trip.

I gripped the handrail with white-knuckled intensity, while trying to convey casual nonchalance. I managed to get to the bottom of the stairs upright and with the maximum dignity a gawky teen could carry off.

Guys turned to check out the new chicken in town.

I crossed to the elliptical central bar and ordered a beer.

Waiting for the barman to return with my drink, I dared a quick glance around, taking in the small dance floor, the neon lighting and, to my delight, a glitterball. They actually had a glitterball! My only previous knowledge of a gay bar came solely from The Blue Oyster in the movie Police Academy, which had a glitterball that the Leather Queens danced romantically beneath. I was now convinced every gay venue in the world had one.

I clocked one cute guy around the curve of the bar to my left.

He looks very handsome, I thought, around my age, chiselled jawline, slicked back black hair. Oh, hang on… It’s a lesbian.

My drink arrived. I let out a sigh of relief. I had made it inside, down the stairs and got a drink, all without incident. The night was mine!

A hand fell upon my shoulder.

“How are you, young man?”

I turned to find the benignly smiling face… of my form teacher.

Sat at a bar with my teacher wasn’t exactly how I’d expected my first night on the scene to turn out… but I could not have wanted for a better introduction.

It was a relief to finally have another gay man to confide in, even better that it was a familiar and trusted figure. Here was an opportunity to talk to someone with experience of a world I was taking my first steps into.

Although being caught in a gay bar by Sir had been a shock, I had not been surprised that he frequented such establishments. Rumours about him had circulated school for years. The shaved head, handlebar moustache, penchant for a leather jacket and the general Village People vibe had also been a bit of a giveaway. He wouldn’t have looked out of place swaying beneath that glitterball at The Blue Oyster.

As the evening progressed, Sir suggested we move on to The Nightingale, the city’s only night club in the 1980s. He was a member and offered to sign me in as his guest.

At this point in the club’s history The Gale, as it is affectionally known, was situated near the stage door of the Birmingham Hippodrome, at the end of a short alley. You had to ring the bell, wait until a face appeared behind a sliding slot, then confirm you knew what type of bar it was before being admitted.

Once inside, there was a cloakroom and small bar dominated by a gaudy fountain.  Beyond was the main disco. On the far side of the dancefloor was a dimly lit area, partitioned off from prying eyes. I remember being baffled as to why anyone would want to disappear into a dark subdivision of a busy nightclub. How naive! So much to learn… and so much fun learning.

At the end of the night, Sir drove me home, dropping off a few streets away, so as not to arouse suspicions of sleepless parents, inevitably awaiting their teenage son’s late-night return.

I am eternally grateful to my then form teacher for looking after me on my first night out on Birmingham’s gay scene.

I have told this tale many times over the years, inevitably greeted by cynical eyebrows and the implication he was on the make… but no, he was the perfect gentleman… and continues to be to this day.

To Sir, With Love. X

Find over 100 tales from Birmingham's gay scene @talesofthesecondcity.com

[bitter69uk]

“Like [Mario] Lanza, Maria Montez had a reputation for being impossible to handle. After a number of years in Haji-Baba type adventures, she was dropped by Universal and forced to seek work in European cheapies. While in Europe, she attempted to counter her advanced state of avoirdupois with hot saline baths. She died in one of a heart attack at the age of thirty-one.”

/ From the book Flesh and Fantasy (1978) by Penny Stallings /

Died on this day in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes, France: golden age Hollywood’s nostril-flaring and tempestuous Queen of Technicolour Exotica, Caribbean Cyclone and leading lady of films like Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944), Maria Montez (née María África Gracia Vidal, 6 June 1912 – 7 September 1951). Note: Stallings gets Montez’s age wrong in the quote above – she was 39 when she died. (Like any self-respecting diva, Montez had a “showbiz age”). Venerated by the likes of Gore Vidal and underground queer filmmakers Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, Montez is a pivotal figure in the sensibility we now call “camp” and one of the original LGBTQIA icons. (Early Warhol drag superstar Mario Montez, for example, was christened after her). And aside from perhaps the young Yvonne De Carlo, did any woman wear a yashmak with more elan? “When I see myself on the screen, I look so beautiful I want to scream with joy” Montez once famously exclaimed. Maria Montez, you make ME scream with joy! Pictured: Montez in the 1949 film Siren of Atlantis playing – what else? – an evil queen.

[datingcentralauckland]

Time to write a most beautiful novel

The world is ending, and it is beautiful. I know two things, only two, all human skulls are smiling at their failed stories, and….

I cannot hold you in the rain, on the edge of some long future, skinny and optimistic in youth, and hungry for an adventure shared in the mystery of a new dawn. We cannot be, youth’s true beauty, as my moment has gone. Our wet bodies intermingling with the thermal heat of our hearts, slowly being drained and reborn by clouds as they weep across the lake; exists at best in dreams, at mediocre in delusion, and at worst in hope.

I have claimed no warrior to my soul ancient and raw, she fades between neon fads that ebb and flow to each generation’s moment in the eternal window of love, in volume to the breeze of each horizon. Anyone can be a king or queen of their heart, although this is not a world of brave enemies and honest adventures. It is just a bureaucracy of existence, staining the natural, with a civilized slavery of survival. That is perhaps why, love feels synthetic to the point that synthetic, is the only escape, from a life of survival.

Did you know the world was ending, Cold Fusion will power Quantum Computers, which in turn will power Artificial Intelligence, and in turn that will power Crypto Currency. The synthetic world will be free and abundant, states will be corporations, and military power will simply be state-accredited companies. We are in the before times, the world is melting; we are going back to the moon and landing on Mars. Everything is important, but somehow the people are also more invisible, like a pixel on a screen, that you only notice, when it is missing.

A story can already be created at the push of a button, but the soul of its spine decorated in flowers, cannot. For the android is as immortal as the hope of love, wished on in truth. But to smile upon such reflections is but a mirror that dreams of escaping the rhetoric of a politician’s vision, lost in the grave, smiling at their own empire. Millions of jobs as half-truths have already been wiped away from the plane of existence, leaving their last victims richer for it. What remains for me in the death of the old, and this in-between, of a world where the technological cookie jar, is too high to reach?

The only thing I can surmise is that ‘Love Remains.’

Perhaps it is as a charity, or a digital ‘Woodstock,’ floating through the technicoloured multi-dimensional highway as the only inter-galactical species to create our own zoo to live in, while starving to death. Love is meant to be simple and truthful, even in the sensation of being lost, but in truth, life brushes against a self-imposed threat of survival conformity. Statistically from death alone, love does not survive, and you can generally scale it down from there. But oh, for visions of lakes and love, we squander time, to fickle empires of shallow personas, and the armour made from tinfoil hats, we adorn on our pretty bodies. Perhaps if I whisper quietly enough to myself, I would say, ‘Love remains… because it is a curse.’

I shall wish to be that missing pixel, and craft myself into an artisan of darkness, slowly chipping away at marble while drowning in the techno-vomit-yawn of human zombies. The young have grandiose dreams and their parent fail them, the adults have grounded dreams, and their countries fail them, and the dying have simple pleasures, and their children fail them. It is getting dark now, my little black spot in the universe, where colour has been swallowed by the void, to decorate its own inner walls, like monochrome dust, upon a rainbow. Perhaps I am already an overgrown grave forgotten in the wilderness, and perhaps that is all that remains of my love potential, and an empire of crickets, ants, and weeds.

‘There are some realities not worth fighting for,’ because really, who fought for your innocence in loves delight and life’s beauty. Perhaps I am ugly with memories, and this synthetic universe is everyone else’s real life, and I must remain hidden to prevent their shame. There is no balance to this universe, only nature had balance, but now the universe consumes, and nature only reveals from its absence. I want to say something, but I cannot really remember what it was, perhaps I was going to tell you, ‘I am love.’

‘You are here,’ the fine print of the universe, life has doom-scrolled you, and accepted the terms and services, life is on its free subscription, such is time immortal to love's demise.

Money does seem to be a creature comfort to love, it is perhaps why a vast majority of woman are single, hence, love has a more widely accepted social subscription model. You are no king or queen of a country, if none from that country would take you as your lover, and from that, the heart can be a bitter place. Many women fantasize about control, even domination, but are repulsed by the manual labour contours of fairytales and that nuclear cosmopolitan vintage esthetic. Perhaps they are right, ask a man to describe a perfect woman and watch them describe a slave or sub-human fluid dumpster.

Woman want the Hollywood, princess, queen, experience, but they haven’t got all the sanity credits to afford it, or even know that it’s the wrong thing. Even in delusion they pick kings whose mental state is a cockroach infested shoebox, floating in-between rivers of carbon monoxide, flat earth egos. Perhaps it’s a universal survival instinct that is species specific; the desire to be wanted, rather than alone and naked to the truth; death is as comfortable as love. Or perhaps even worse, love is only real around the edge of life and death, like a war of the souls. There is something beautiful about the release of permeance, all plans and hope dissolves to the simple now.

People disappoint, in fact, few do not, we are for all our flaws, useless creatures dancing beneath the innocence of an immortal imprint on the world. Meaningless ripples onto the dissipating plateau of a void, seeking silence between the mist of irony. Love is a hopeless sanity.

[forgot-how-catflap-works]

The GUPPY Appreciation Zone (and some stuff about being gay and possibly an alien)

You have entered the GUPPY Appreciation Zone. Please remain seated and keep your appendages within the designated zone for the duration of this appreciation. The GUPPY Appreciation Zone does not accept liability for any tentacles, tendrils or fronds harmed through the disregardment of these instructions. 

What is GUPPY and how does one appreciate it? GUPPY is a band that originated in LA about seven years ago, presumably through a process involving primordial goo and alien technology. The most effective way to appreciate GUPPY is to play American Cowboy – at full volume – and jiggle your body around the food preparation area of your habitat while loudly singing the refrain, “I’m an American Cowboy, and my stomach hurts like shit”.  

This is not a review of GUPPY’s latest album Something is Happening, because I'm not really qualified for that. I could say how much I love vocalist J’s playful inflections that make them extra fun to sing along to; or I could tell you how great it is they use a slide whistle in Mayor Pt.2, and how the track develops this wild, galloping, circus-clown quality that just gets better the more you listen to it. But really I just want to appreciate them. This is the GUPPY Appreciation Zone afterall. Not The Smart Bitch Who Knows Stuff About Music Zone. 

(Clip clop horse cop, City hall salami. Kiss your baby, Now I am your mommy)

Previously described as “the new gayer, Green Day” by Out Magazine, GUPPY’s music could best be defined as tenderpunk, a term coined by Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin who is also the band's producer. 

I lifted that tenderpunk insight from this Swim into Sound blog post but I did already know about the Sarah Tudzin connection because I AM VERY COOL AND KNOW THINGS ABOUT COOL AND TRENDY MUSIC. NO I DO NOT HAVE RECEIPTS.

As someone who never got into Green Day, I can’t really say how that comparison stacks up. Their drummer Gabbi is a huge Green Day, and the first album had a rough, straightforward garage sound to it along with the kind of atmosphere you only get when everyone involved is having fun. Is that the sort of thing Green Day is known for? I literally have no idea. 

What I can confirm however is that GUPPY's music is deeply gay, and the kind of gay that is difficult to quantify. Speaking as an autistic, navel gazing kind of queer I often feel disconnected from large swathes of popular gay culture. I’m not really here for drag queens and Lady Gaga and the sort of technicolour hedonism that tends to monopolise portrayals of queer culture in modern media. It’s fine, pop off, live your best life etc. It’s just not my speed. But because it’s the default depiction of queerness I’m left feeling like I’m somehow not the right kind of queer.  Like I'm an alien.

Speaking to Out Magazine after the release of their first album in 2017, J said: “GUPPY is all about having fun with your friends in a totally unchecked and spontaneous way. This is a space I think that a lot of femme, nonbinary, queer folk don't get the chance to occupy. Like, yeah, we've all seen Bam Margera and Tyler the Creator be silly menaces in a fun and lovable way, but I just wanna say there are some new freakin' menaces in town. And these new menaces are soft as fuck because being soft never stopped anyone from having fun. So stay soft, my LGBTQ cuties, and please remember to continue enjoying yourself as an act of resistance.”

GUPPY 's queernes makes sense to me. It transcends sexual and gender identity; social norms I exist outside of through my mere existence as a trans dyke. The labels I chose to define myself are more for the benefit of a society that feels the need to categorise me rather than something I need for myself.

It’s a queerness of the soul. An almost Victorian definition of queer, before it meant gay and it meant, you know, queer. Odd, peculiar, not right somehow. Something amiss. Like, what is that person doing with their arms? Have they ever even used their arms before? Are they an actual alien doing a really shit impression of a human? Who do I call about this? 

From that transcendental queerness GUPPY blooms in all their glory. They would rather eat the pavement than kiss Nacy Pelosi's boot. They were made mayor for the day and all they got were their feelings hurt. They’re texting God in their head. They ate their own homework (the dog made them do it).

I could pick almost any lyric from any track of the new album to illustrate the difficult to define queerness of GUPPY, but for whatever reason the opening lines of Nature Song feel right.

Go out in the front yard you’ll find Ian pulling weeds

Go out in the backyard and that’s where you’ll find me

I’m digging up worms

I’m taking them to church

I’m taking them to church

If you can’t understand how that’s gay, I don’t know what to tell you.