Tuesday 23 December 2014

Christmas is coming.

[opens door]

Oh my days it's you! How are you?

[you hand me a gift wrapped basket of pornography]

Oh! Is that for us? That's so thoughtful!

[I rummage through and pull out 2001: Erased Modesty]

Oh, Jeb will love this one. Is this the director's cut with the monkeys still left in? Fantastic. Come in! Come in and have a coffee.

[I take you by the hand and guide you through beneath slabs of meat hanging on rusty hooks. We sit on short stools around a tiny table. Seryn and Jeb are in the corner, hanging stale donuts and cheap tat on the giant twig we use as a Christmas tree. You can hear Ed in the next room, singing in a falsetto voice whilst doing the washing up loudly in a passive aggressive attempt to make us feel guilty]

So, how have you been?

[you give me some boring answer about the family and illness and how much bad stuff has happened to you]

Yeah, that's great. Let me put some music on.




Now this is one of my favourites of the year. Should perk you up. It's got Christmas bells in it at the beginning.

[you finally ask how our year has been]

Well, it's been a funny one! We've had things that we thought were going to happen sink without trace, but then new and more exciting things have constantly popped up to replace them, which is cool. Display came out this year, and did nicely. We did a UK tour, a little European tour, and loads of shows, all around the place. We got some good airplay on Radio One, were a record of the week on BBC Radio Six, smashed the Hype Machine again, broke Soundcloud, went recording at Abbey Road, and just generally did loads of great stuff. Seryn got a job in Sainsbury's car park for last few weeks, which he loves and says he might take up instead of the band. I think he calls it 'extra-commercial lead generation', which excites him, at least.

[Seryn's face appears from behind a bauble: 'I am easily excited, let me tell you.']

It's easy, with the way things are going at the moment, to look at stuff negatively (like, you know, the loud rise of a socially conservative minority that have somehow taken all the popular power in a country where more than half of the voting population voted 'left', and only one third voted for a right wing party – a party that hid behind a lie of centrist rhetoric, smiles, and bicycles - at the last election...and alongside that the only apparent counterbalance in our popular discourse is a mediocre comedian with the political views of a fifteen year old rolling a spliff under a pier), but when we think that this year we've had some of our best gigs, and our best times, in the back of a ragged old van with cheap bottles of booze and a DIY set-up that we love more than life itself, it's difficult to be upset. We have been very, very, very lucky.

[you warn us about...]

Yes, yes, I know. Still, we're really grateful to Ben and Stevie at X Novo, Jörg, Colin, Vivien, and Robin at Humming Records, Jesse the plugger, James and Jules at The Agency, Carlo at ASS (or wherever he is now), Ciara and Bram and Nell and Archie, erm...we're grateful to everyone we've stopped working with this year for everything they've done, and we're really looking forward to new relationships in the new year. We're grateful to all the promoters who had us play, and all of the people who let us stay in their houses, without knowing us. Nottingham; Leicester; Copenhagen. We're just grateful for everyone who's been involved – everyone who came to see us, everyone who bought the EP, everyone who follows us on social media, everyone who's covered us and interviewed us in blogs and on 'tape'. Even the person alone in their room who was looking at pictures of me and then accidentally clicked 'like' on the Phoria page and was about to 'unlike' until this textual distraction popped up in their newsfeed. That's a list, isn't it?

['Stop it.']

Alright.

It's true, though.

So, yeah. What are you doing for Christmas?

[you say how you're spending it alone, curled up beside a candle for warmth and drawing pictures with your finger in the ripped carpet of all the people who have abandoned you.]


['What...like...pornography?]

Obviously not.

['Like...money? Are there no workhouses?']

Well, yeah. Call centres. But many would rather die than cold call vulnerable people and scare them into buying double glazing.

['Then they had better hurry up and die, and decrease the surplus population.']

Not sure.

['Yeah, they should.']

Don't know.

[Seryn's wide-eyed face pops out from the top of the Christmas twig and says: 'Christmas, let me tell you.' Jeb is eyeing up one of the donuts.]

[you ask if we got you anything, as you have very little to your name but still managed to steal us a big basket of now illegal pornography. I flick through the most recent ones, including In to Stella and Hard Ians of the Galaxy. allow me this fun]

Watch our social media on Christmas day, perhaps. Watch our social media on Christmas day, perhaps when you're stuffed full of Turkey [you say you haven't got a Turkey] and supermarket booze [you spent all your money on double glazing, you say] and perhaps we'll make something available to soothe your spirit. Maybe we'll have something available around then that you can put your Christmas money into.

Something distant from the racket, which everyone will need.

[Jeb puts the star on top of the tree, picks a donut from the box, and whispers in my ear that it's time for 'The Ritual']

Well, I'm going to have to let you go.
[You say your name is Trewin and you live here]

No you don't. Bye.


Achieve.

All milky and lava-lamp-ish the street-lights reflecting on my big red car bonnet as I curl it round at night all sound and echoing engine...