This is the 7th year in a row I’ve run my bandcamp subscriptions, and the 7th year in a row I have made my (fool)hardy subscribers and Indoctrination Kit – a CD and Booklet full of absurd stories and lies about that year’s musical endeavours. 

While I’m working on the latest Indoctrination Kit, I thought I’d have a look back at previous ones. 

Year 5 was all about The Beast And Mr Knock, a set of 5 songs and an accompanying short story. It was all about a group of children with various supernatural abilities who were kidnapped, and who escaped with the help of The Beast. 

It’s proper full on madness – what’s going on this song right is that two people are seeking revenge for what was done to them. And what was done is that a load of children with the supernatural ability to take other people into their lucid dreams – were captured and forced to use that ability to entertain various unpleasant men. The children were kept in line by the fearsome Mr Knock.  But one of the children was able to summon The Beast to help them. Two escaped, and now they hope to exact revenge. 

It was very much a collaborative affair. I asked people to send me pictures that might inspire songs. Knowing the sort of thing I write about, my lovely bandcamp subscribers sent me a load of creepy pictures. Weird houses, empty rooms, a wooden mask hanging on a door, and best of all an entire set of pictures from an actual abandoned asylum somewhere in America that subscriber Doug happened to have visited (let’s not ask too many details as to why). 

I printed ‘em out, stuck them in a new notebook and got to work. As with many of my songs the breakthrough was when I got inside the main characters head and realised what their story was. I ended up writing a couple of pages of their inner monologue about the house that haunted them from their childhood, and the rest of the EP came from there. 

If you’d like to know more about my bandcamp subscription, you can find more info over here.