Roni Sizzzzz...

[Bristol, yesterday]











It has come to Chokecentral's attention, via a handful of slightly annoying articles in the national press, that the Bristol Sound is "back!".

If you believe the Telegraph and Guardian you'd think the city had spent the last ten years in silence - its musical heroes either drowned in the Severn Estuary like Richie Manic or buried under the weight of their own spliffed-out indolence. As melody and rhythm wafted from the streets of Hackney and Sheffield to international acclaim, it seems the only sound coming out of Bristol was a row between city elders over which imperialist atrocity to name the new shopping centre after.

This is bollocks, of course. The British press and music industry have ignored every interesting thing to come out of Bristol for the last ten years because none of it matched their prejudice about what Bristol is supposed to sound like. That's why hardly anyone knows who Madnomad were and why Mooz split up without a mention in the music press; why SJ Esau is signed in America and Chikinki play most of their shows in Germany. It's also why Gravenhurst have yet to appear on Later..., why Geisha can't get a proper tour and Team Brick can't afford to buy his own shoes. It's also probably why the only vaguely succesful act to come out of Bristol in the last decade are Kosheen, a coffee table product every bit as cynical and contrived as Nestlé's "fairtrade" brand.

But the Bristol Sound is "back!" and alongside the (brilliant, by all accounts) new Portishead album this means releases from the likes of Massive Attack, Tricky and Roni Size's Reprazent. And this is where the whole revival thing really falls down because each of these acts has strayed so far from their original blueprint that whatever they previously had in common is now pretty hard to detect. Well, all of them apart from Roni Size, who is treading water even by the current standards of drum & bass, having just remixed and re-released an album that was over-long, over-produced and over-rated in the first place. Meanwhile, long-lost genius Tricky was last seen jamming with MTV tossers The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Massive Attack's last album was as far from soul and as far up 3D's arsehole as you can comfortably imagine. A return to form from either would be nice but at least they're not repeating themselves.

But while Bristol's 'Big Three' are all busy doing their own thing there are certain continuities. Pinch's 'Underwater Dancehall' - a devilishly smart fusion of cutting-edge dance music and urban reflection - is closer in spirit to the template laid down by Smith & Mighty than anything I've heard in years. Unfortunately, it's been pigeonholed as a dubstep release which - combined with a format which makes the stronger instrumental version look like a bonus disc - has probably scuppered its chances of serious airplay.

Still, it was a spirit of adventure that reigned here in the 90's and I think that holds true today. With labels like Tectonic, Punch Drunk and Deathsucker flying the flag for uncompromising dance music and the Venn festival an annual reminder of how many people round here still like their heads to be fucked with, it seems the city is still a home for challenging sounds. Meanwhile, a generation of bands from Tractor to Countryside are ploughing their own furrow, seemingly ignorant of the "chilled beats" the media are hoping for. Everybody worth talking about is a law unto themselves with little reverence for the glories of the past. Apart from poor old Roni Zzzzzz...

Doctor Who [Warning: Contains spoilers!]

The First Doctor, Davros and Captain Jack Harkness in happier times.























Doctor Who is back on the box and everything is ok. Or so series head honcho Russell T Davies would like you to believe. However, Chokecentral has had a tip off from one of the catering staff at BBC Cardiff, suggesting that the published list of episodes for Season Four is a red herring.

Here’s what she says is coming up later in the series. I’ve left one or two episodes out because they don’t sound very plausible.

Episode 3 - Doctorz 'N The Hood: Two Doctors meet with consequences for the future of the music industry, but only one of them is a Time Lord! Dr Dre co-stars, wielding his "Chronic Screwdriver". Introducing Snoop Doggy Dogg as K-9.

Episode 4 - The Paris Dilemma: The Doctor and Sarah-Jane Smith head back to the 1970s for old time's sake. After a series of misunderstandings at a New York disco, The Doctor finds himself holding the balls of property magnate Richard Hilton. Suddenly it dawns on him that a single massive squeeze could prevent a terrible fate for all mankind.

Episode 7 - The Dalek Invasion Of Essex: Having failed to take over the cosmos, The Daleks decide to invade London via the back door. Landing on Southend Pier, they are forced to abandon their terrible plot when the Hall of Mirrors convinces them that the local Daleks are much taller, wider and more ruthless than they are.

Episode 8 - Carry On Doctor: An outbreak of outmoded suburban stereotypes and agonising double entendres threatens to destabilise the entire universe. With Charles Hawtrey as Davros.

Episode 10 - Quo Tardis: The Doctor and new companion Dawn French crash land in Wembley, Earth during the opening stages of Live Aid. Francis Rossi has been reduced to the size of a walnut by The Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator. Can The Doctor's sonic plectrum save the show from catastrophe?

Episodes 11 & 12 - Three Doctors & A Baby [extraordinary two-part series finale!]: When Rose Tyler leaves him to go hunting Cybermen with ex-boyfriend Mickey, The Doctor calls on two of his former selves to help with the childcare. It's their greatest challenge to date...but who is the father? Answer: they all are! Co-starring Tom Selleck as the space-time continuum and Shirley off Eastenders as Rose.

Reflections On Cuba

Watching CNN from a Cuban hotel is a surreal experience. Hourly updates on the homeland security of the world’s biggest arsenal look deranged from this most vulnerable of neighbouring countries. Earnest debates about the private lives of celebrities seem as relevant to daily life as extra-terrestrial babble caught between frequencies on a long wave radio. Competing ads for expensive diet plans and Extreme Grand Slam Breakfasts mean nothing in a country where people eat for sustenance rather than sport and where feasting remains synonymous with celebration. Celebrating is what Cubans do best. Celebrities are people you buy a beer for after the show. They don’t make the headlines unless their surname is Castro.

Cuba is the unlikeliest of places: a fiercely independent socialist republic perched precariously between the North American free trade zone and the capitalist playgrounds of the Caribbean. That it has proudly refused to fall apart despite fifty years of economic torture by the US government is difficult to believe until you see it for yourself. And it doesn't make that much sense when you have.

Power cuts occur almost daily. Public transport is either infrequent or non-existent. Cubans work long hours for meagre food rations, basic accommodation and barely enough pesos to keep themselves in clothes and smokes. Tap water is either dirt-brown or undrinkably chlorinated. Half the motor vehicles are older than the Revolution. Rural people live under thatched roofs fixed up with bin liners while suburbia is a mess of battered Soviet-style apartment blocks decorated with laundry and the slogans of a global revolution that collapsed in Bolivia in 1967.

Written communications are censored to the extent that people ask tourists to write to overseas relations when they get home. Email is an increasingly popular alternative but hardly anyone has their own computer. Cubans and tourists who want to communicate freely with the outside world are therefore at the mercy of internet cafes whose staff mysteriously disappear for an hour and a half at the exact moment your session times out. In my experience, this is most likely to happen while you are in the middle of something either highly embarassing or terribly important. The Cuban legal system may have its critics but sod's law is clearly alive and well.

The news media is so spineless that most people don't bother with it, switching over to the very rum cocktail of sport, soaps, speeches and salsa dancing that passes for entertainment. Ration queues are interminable and ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the government is so afraid of losing its highly skilled workforce to foreign opportunities that, even if a citizen somehow saves enough for his air fare, it's almost impossible for him to get permission to leave.

And yet it's hard to return home from a trip to Cuba without longing to go back. Despite the real hardships and almost total absence of political freedom, it's a country that many more privileged societies could learn from. Its mixed-race population, a heady infusion of European, African, Native American, Caribbean and (perhaps surprisingly) Chinese roots, is the most integrated and unified in the Americas. Everything from the Creole-style cooking to the world-famous music reflects its unique ability to absorb cultural influences from everyone who goes there. Most notably of all, its people are among the most welcoming, witty and, despite living under a dictatorship, uninhibited in the world. It seems perfectly normal for Cubans to discourse at length on subjects as varied as love, politics and the good life with total strangers. And that’s before they’ve had a drink. A shot or two later and they’re dancing in the streets.

The mojito is without a doubt the greatest drink in the world: rum, soda, refined sugar, lime or lemon juice, fresh mint leaves and loads of ice. It re-arranges your senses like no other drink. It's narcotic, energising and mind-expanding all in one go. Every sip engenders tiny, yet perceptible, mutations at cellular level until you emerge from its minty chrysalis transformed into something less English and more attractive. If you shop around, a bottle of ordinary white rum should set you back less than a carton of orange juice. You'll soon get a taste for strong measures.

The best way to find out what's going on is to get talking to a Cuban and the best way to achieve this is to look like a tourist. He may well want to tell you his life story and ask you to buy him a beer. Cuban lives are interesting and drinks are cheap so it's well worth it. Your new friend is your access-all-areas pass to affordable meals, parties and rides in impossibly well preserved '55 Chevrolets. If you keep supplying him with cigarettes he'll probably be your friend and guide all day, maybe even until you leave town. He may also try to sell you a box of cigars that has mysteriously extricated itself from the supply chain.

The black market is everywhere in Cuba these days. The bizarre dual currency situation means that most consumer goods are only available in convertibles (tourist dollars) whereas wages are paid in Cuban pesos. Unless you're a taxi driver, barman, waitress or chamber-maid and have access to tips the only obvious way to get convertibles is by selling stuff to tourists. This seems to be unofficially tolerated as long as it doesn't affect exports, or at least it's done openly enough to suggest that people aren't that worried about getting caught.

The black market is gradually creating a kind of class system which seems entirely inappropriate in a socialist state. Entrepreneurial types with access to a steady supply of convertibles flash branded clothes and mobile phones while the less industrious, more obviously rum-sodden members of society beg tourists for hard cash and hair products. Apart from street deals and begging, the only crime worth mentioning is prostitution, an inevitable side-effect of the tourist boom. I can only assume that the government avoids cracking down hard on these practices because it's preferable to watching the entire population dodging the sharks to Miami. Meanwhile, muggings and other violent crime are rare enough to offer a shameful comparison with thuggish, individualistic Britain.

I kind of expected Cuba to challenge my political views a bit but it just reinforced them. Repression makes people unhappy and unable to fulfil their dreams. Unfettered capitalism makes them hungry, aggressive and dispossessed. The Americans and Cuban governments would be doing both populations a big favour off if they ditched their ridiculous 50-years out of date trade dispute and learned something from each other for a change. And you know what? That's exactly what any Cuban will tell you if you buy him a beer.

How To Make It In The Music Business

With the South West Sound music convention returning to Bristol this month, every man and his dealer is going to be in town giving helpful advice to the kids on how to "make it" in the music business.

While the very idea of a music 'industry' gives Chokecentral terrifying visions of a kind of machine-woven prolefeed doled out to undermine the democracy of free expression, clearly some of you would rather be part of the problem than the solution. Well, either that or you're not as paranoid as I am.

Anyway, if you do fancy yourself as a stitch in the boot that's stamping on the face of humanity, here are a few ways your career as a lifestyle accessory might turn out.

Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the protean mass of contraditions that is Chokecentral's existence, I've named each option after a song you probably wouldn't even have heard of without the evil machinations of those dirty little men in suits, thereby seriously undermining my whole point.

The 'Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’
1. Get signed
2. Get dropped
3. Kill yourself
(NB: the second stage isn’t really that important)

The ‘See You On The Way Back Down’ (with apologies to Hacksaw)
1. Get signed
2. Get dropped
3. Hit the ‘revival’ trail. Have all your hopes and dreams crushed by the mocking laughter of the fickle public.
4. Kill yourself

The ‘Crossroads Blues’ (aka Living The Dream)
1. Have the time of your life making ground-breaking, thrilling music
2. Stop taking yourself so bloody seriously. Invent unit shifting pop act with a nod to underground credibility
3. Make $$$hitloads
4. Start your own label to support new talent and ‘give something back’
5. Sell out label to the majors, retire on the proceeds and try to appear nonchalant as they destroy everything you ever worked for when you were still recognisable as a human being
6. Kill yourself. Or get killed. Or possibly kill someone else.

The ‘Wannabe’
1. Form band
2. Create press pack in which the prominently displayed phrase ‘interest from a number of major labels’ actually refers to the number of your CDs that have been binned by record companies. After all, they only gave you their postal addresses to get your dad off the phone.
3. Change the band’s name and look every couple of years in a vain attempt at appearing to be relevant
4. Repeat stage three until you realise that your friends have all deserted you and that even the most imaginative of A&R scum can’t find a use for your worthless life. Even as a drug mule.
5. Attempt to kill yourself but fuck it right up
6. Repeat stage five until you die, penniless and unloved, some decades later. Of natural causes. Unsigned.

‘The Great Escape’
1. Get signed
2. Get dropped
3. Go back to your day job
4. Grow up

Good luck!

Record Review Submitted Two Years Late

This review of Twocsinak's debut EP was originally written for Choke issue 13.5, otherwise known as the issue that we never got round to publishing, sometime in 2005. I still love the EP so much that I thought I'd post the review now, even though it's somewhat doubtful that anyone will actually bother to read it. Incidentally, since this was written Twocsinak has released an equally fine album on Shitmat's Wrongmusic label. I wouldn't hold your breath for a review though.



TWOCSINAK – ‘Art’s Equivalent to MFI with his Rolls Royce of Builders’ Skip’ EP (Clean Cut Records)




The lengthy title is just the start. At forty-five minutes long, this is not only one of the longest EPs I have heard, it also possesses the most extensive self-penned sleevenotes you are ever likely to read. And that’s before we even get to the cartoons. Twocsinak is clearly a man with creative diahorrea. Luckily for us, his shit is a taste worth acquiring.

A handsomely arranged buffet of twenty-two sample ‘n’ paste morsels, ‘Art’s Equivalent’ is a bizarre mixture of wide-eyed musical experimentation and pop-cultural collage, bringing to mind a bootleg mix of ‘The Faust Tapes’ and St. Etienne’s ‘Foxbase Alpha’ with added indie-boy shambling. Taking in pretty much every contemporary style of music and a bewildering array of instruments, its unique style is the seemingly inevitable product of a truly scatterbrained imagination.

Poignantly delicate one minute and winningly silly the next, Twocsinak’s debut is a children’s playground of abrupt mood swings. Creepy music boxes segue into euphoric rave stabs. Chirpy human beatbox patterns give way to lo-fi self-examination. A telephone conversation about where to buy Hip Hop records sits close by a hilarious deconstruction of the UK style press. You also get bits of jazz, folk, jungle, some lovely piano melodies and some cracking home-recorded jams with collaborators too numerous to list here.

The last song contains the line: ‘I know it’s indulgent to write songs in first person but it seems I’m the only person I know’. While this may or may not be the case, a couple of listens to ‘Art’s Equivalent to MFI’ and you’ll know Twocsinak like a childhood friend. This is the weirdest, loveliest and most surprising object I’ve picked off the doormat so far this year. It’s also as DIY as hell and chummy as fuck. Rejoice.

Willie the Disc

Genius Devalued

News just in.

Since Johnny Borrell of Razorlight started using it the word 'genius' has been significantly devalued.

It is now provisionally defined by the OED as 'A talentless, no good shit for brains with the songwriting talent of a catheter, the voice of an estate agent fellating a tramp on a wet wednesday and the ego of Jeffrey Archer being lapdanced by God Almighty while snorting cocaine off Helen Of Troy's tits backstage at The Delusional Narcissists' Pollwinners Party.'

Cheers Johnny.

David Irving's Revised History Of Pop

A Revised History of Pop.



Hi, David Irving here. As a world famous maverick historian, I'd normally be far too busy to write for Choke. Unfortunately, I am currently stuck in a prison cell in Austria with only a copy of The Residents' 'Third Reich & Roll' for entertainment. A lifelong fan of rock music, I have come to suspect that the received view of its history has been distorted by a liberal bias imposed by the victorious powers of the Second World War. In my forthcoming bestseller, I identify a series of persistent pop myths and do my best to set the record straight. To whet your appetite, here are some examples of the fruits of my tireless academic research.

The Birth Of Rock & Roll.

Open any 'official' history book and you'll be told that rock and roll was invented in the 1950s by black Americans. This is a lie! It was in fact developed by Chinese serfs in the middle ages and exported around the globe by spice merchants. Ironically, America's isolationist foreign policy meant that it was the only country in the world without a proud rock tradition by the late nineteenth century. Rock & Roll finally arrived on American shores when Chuck Berry was deported from Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution.

Dylan Goes Electric.

Boring, grown up music magazines like Mojo, Uncut and Rolling Stone endlessly re-tell the story of Bob Dylan's conversion to the joys of rock but I have it on excellent authority that this never happened! On a recent lecture tour of midwest rifle clubs, I met a cousin of Dylan's who insists his famous relative is still strumming away at coffee houses in Greenwich Village under the name Mossy Datsun. The figure we now know as Dylan is in fact a Gorillaz-style animation invented in 1962 when the CIA thought protest singers were planning to bring down the military-industrial complex by getting their tits out and singing about hammers.

David Bowie: Chameleon of Pop.

Rock superstar Bowie is famous for changing his identity. What is less well known is that his early 'Ziggy Stardust' persona was a highly sophisticated double bluff. Bowie is, in fact, an actual space alien from space. If you want proof, check out the irrefutable documentary evidence I taped off BBC2, in which 'Bowie' is seen arriving on Earth to fetch water for his dying planet.

M-People Win The Mercury Music Prize.

Incredibly, this did actually happen. What is less well known is that their 90's smash 'Search For The Hero' was a work of plagiarism. Originally a poem by Friedrich Holderlein, it was set to music in the mid-thirties by a hack composer from Dusseldorf and soon became a popular singalong on Hitler Youth marches. My source, currently resident in a Brazilian retirement home, assures me that this shocking fact has been hushed up by a Yankee-Zionist music industry determined to undermine the achievements of National Socialism.

'It's Like Punk Never Happened' by David Irving is out in June. Its author is expected to follow some time in 2008.