| Enough to make your knickers wet with foreign juices, it's... Dani's Inferno Pact: Twenty sicks: Here comes the scum... So summer is upon us again, descending like some flame-wreathed phoenix from the severed heavens, mantled in swelter welts and higher mortgage rates of cancer. Time once more for nonchalant sunglass fever, backdoor barbecues and Deejays regurgitating sad mantras about Ibiza and other atrocities. All radios double in volume and bass level. The breeze, thick with humidity unright for our climate is suddenly sickly sweet with the reek of factor fifteen on sagging cleavage, the youth become Californian, the elderly wear white in favour of grey. Squealing tyres, petrol mowers and carrion, migrant birds hog the roads and air. Pent up, cooked hormones congeal in flesh receptacles, a clicking insect libido when the lights and tights go down. Cabin fever. Bermuda contagion. Cloying sweat leaps from man to man as too does the notion that every woman in anything less than a late nineteenth centruy diving suit demands their utmost lecherous intent. Cities acquire the stench of abattoris, brazen meat markets simmering to Maggotropolis. Coastline resorts threaten to break off under unwelcome attention and drift off into the ocean, leaving the Great British Isles with more the appearance of a basking beached whale than the temperated Dragon rampart the Euros once economically feared. Rover and Ford falter for not spewing out enough soft-tops geared toward the Internet Shares investor at this time of year, less informative highways crawl to a standstill with tin-opened BMW, VW and sporty, foreign fuck you's blaring the latest Speedhousedubgaragetechnodance craze, backseat speakers rife with electro-chitteringnonsense interrupted only by the microwave fuzz of in-car/in-ear/in-sane mobile drones. Even our beloved Metal scene seems to undergo a near-complete refurbishment beneath the glare of seasonal scrutiny. The Top Forty suddenly bears witness to an influx of pop-metal combos such as Terrorvision and Skunk 'n' Onion (sorry Skunk Anansie, it was just that I got a whiff of my summer armpits...!) all masquerading as alternative crossover. Don't get me wrong, they're good at what they do and, hell, I'd rather listen to them (well, bar that 'Tequila' abortion than something like say, Christina Agui- I'd have to remove my tongue to pronounce it properly-laryasshole, but at the end of the day, it's an embarrassment. Maybe I'm just riled because at last years 'Meringue' Awards Ceremony, Cradle of Filth came second to the jangly wet Stereophonics in the best British band category (which says a lot for said readership, voting for both of us!), but I believe (and say this with inward-studded codpiece thrust satanically towards an Apocalypse-ridden horizon-a sincerity beyound common sense) that metal need not prostitute itself unduly, if at all, just becasue everybody's walking around with sunstroke-etched grins and deeper tans from a bottle. Okay, so it darkens later and Angels always fall in love with the Humans in summer, but is this any need for more Fear Factory dance remix albums per normal one of their albums? Metal clubs incessantly spinning Travis and Oasis releases, badass dogtown attitude and keychains, Limp Wizzdick and, above all else of fate, Fucking Groop Dogrill? I think not. Or is it because at the tender age of TwentySix, Six, Six, I'm just too old for this constant reinvention malarkey. Maybe that's why I've spent the last 500 words dissing the fortuitous shift in season, and why possibly my band will forever be nothing more than a sour taste in the Balearics to the majority of you. Perhaps I'm gay. Perhaps I don't appreciate the sight of naked nymphettes flaunting their ladylike bits openly in the street, the gaps in their cleavages glistening with beads of moist perspiration like a throat of low hung jewels, the sway of their barely covered hips a mesmeric pendulum inviting later appraisal in porcelain washrooms? Perhaps I should just shut up... I'm not going to be paid fully unless I end on a high note, or write at least nine hundred words, so I've opted for the latter and decided to introduce Cradle's latest acquisition-our new organist, Mike Powell, who is definitely The Man to usurp the throne of the late, great Shite Rev Rudas Priest. Being an eight-grade Pianist aside, Martin (formally of Scouse Scallywags, Anathema not only fills our precious keyboardist's shoes to near perfection, but urinates in them as well. Is it a case of guitar-envy or inherent musical brain damage that motivates the Rock Ivorytinkler to surpass decency, who knows or cares? Mr. Powell has lived up to the newly acquired moniker of 'Saint Disgustus' withour the faintest whiff or morality, or regard for personal hygiene. He first impressed me backstage at last year's Dynamo festival when he took my whole load in his mouth...Sorry, when he allowed himself to be thrust inside a fishy wheelie bin and then set on fire, but since becoming the Sixth Sense in the band, not only has he head banged solidity for six weeks, but in near white-out states of drunkenness we have bone witness to him licking kebab fat off the pavement, flossing his teeth with another's stalwart pubic hair (plucked from the back garden so to speak), eating lard sandwiches and, if that wasn't enough for the Plucky Northern dervish, devouring our bassist's birthday chunder for the paltry sum of sixty quid. The guy's a fucking animal. And there was I worrying... Yours, brain friend to a sun-ripened raisin, Dani- |