As I’m playing a gig in London supporting Simon Godfrey in about a month’s time it seemed sensible to revisit this conversation I had with him for my old podcast, the Sunday Bootleg.

“Simon,” I said, “What I’m going to do now is just say some made up band names. Please pretend you were in these bands, and tell me what it was like”.

And so here we learn about Mr Godfrey’s tenure in Gazpacho Hammer, Fartplex 5000, The Doncaster Kazoo Septet, and many more…

The gig is 26/09/2024 at the Bedford, Balham, doors at 7pm. Tickets can be found here.

I’ve been releasing music just for my bandcamp subscribers for 7 years now. Last week I posted about the 5th Indoctrination Kit I made for them, The Beast and Mr Knock. This time I’m looking back to the year before that and the 4th Indoctrination Kit, Hyperbole.

The deal I have with my lovely* bandcamp subscribers is this: You get all my music, usually earlier than everyone else, plus an exclusive EP every year that’s just for you guys. 

Over covid, with lockdowns and the world going mad, I was stuck at home in my studio even more than usual and those EPs ended up pretty much album length. That’s certainly what happened with Hyperbole, the 4th subscribers ‘EP’. 

The cover is from a homemade video I made for the song ‘Faceless Men’. The whole EP is 8 songs long and clocks in at about 35 minutes. If it was punk, you’d call that an album, right?

It has songs about aliens, crap politicians, weird creatures that come and get you when you’re not looking, mental turmoil, and odd men in gas masks hiding in an underground bunker. Classic pop songs. 

Faceless Men

The first song from it was Faceless Men for which I made an actual music video with me singing at the camera and doing a bit of acting in a gas mask and stuff. This song is a little bit more metal than some of my stuff. Not full on metal, but I turned the guitars up and put some actual RIFFS in the middle bit.

Like The Beast and Mr Knock and a couple of other projects, my Hyperbole EP was inspired in part by pictures sent to me by my bandcamp subscribers. Pictures I had asked for that is. Not the kind of pictures you just started thinking about.  

Cool, weird or creepy or strange pictures that could inspire songs. Faceless Men was inspired by a picture of odd men in gas masks sitting around a dinner table. Barbed Wire Webs was inspired by a picture of a spider, but also a picture of a sort of retro scifi tower in the middle of a field. We Look Up To The Sky was inspired by a proper actual picture from a proper actual talented photographer named Graham who sent me a picture of what looked very much like a stonehenge style standing stone lit up in yellow light. That isn’t what it actually is, but that’s what it sort of looked like. 

As I say, it’s one of several songwriting techniques I’ve used to find new ideas for songs. Look at the picture, then start free writing based on the first thing that comes into your head. Usually for me, what I’m trying to do is get myself into the mind of some fictional character so I can figure out what they’re thinking or feeling and write a song from there. 

So these bandcamp subscribers are actually useful sometimes.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole was the title track from my 4th Subscribers EP. It was inspired by hearing a politician mispronounce the word ‘hyperbole’ twice in quick succession. That wouldn’t be too bad a thing, but in between someone else pronounced it correctly. 

Now, I know, I know that criticizing someone for mispronouncing a word is not fair. Usually that means they discovered the word by reading and that’s definitely a good thing. 

But this was Nadhim Zahawi who used taxpayer’s money to heat his stables – his stables! – and had to resign after his own tax affairs turned out to be potentially dodgy. 

I dislike the man and am glad he is no longer a politician. 

So this is very unusual political subject matter for me, but still a fun song, eh?

If you’d like to hear all of Hyperbole, read the various lies in the Indoctrination Guide, and generally support my music you can find out more here.

*Are they all lovely? No. No, they’re not. But you’ve to be polite, right?

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.

Is there anyone in your life who has gone weird after watching too much Youtube? Been taken in by conspiracies, decided that science and facts are the enemy? That’s who this song is about.

I can’t say there’s a specific person close to me who has been taken in by things like that, to be fair, but it’s something you see a lot in the world. There was a time when we all basically agreed on what the truth was. It started somewhere in the 20th century, and carried on all the way through til maybe the late 90s. There were a small handful of TV channels and radio stations, there was a mass media culture and whether it was correct or not, we basically all shared an understanding of the facts. 

We’d disagree how to react to those facts, but the facts were the facts.  

At some point that began to break down. Rather than mass media, we now have fragmented media with a thousand channels selling us a thousand different versions of the truth. There still is an objective truth, but far too many people don’t understand that a talking head on a social media channel isn’t a reasonable way to discover it. 

Coincidentally, shortly after I released this song as a single in 2022, the author Naomi Klein published a book called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirrorworld which uses exactly the same metaphor to explore exactly the same subject matter. I guess it’s not that unique a metaphor, huh?

So this song is about the sense of loss the main character feels, watching a family member succumb to internet craziness, losing themselves in a parallel world of alternative facts, stuck in a mirror world where they can’t be reached. 

Its soundworld is centred on an open D major tuning – a tuning used on a few songs on Worldbuilding – with the guitar part often equal to the vocal rather than just an accompaniment. The backing is sparse synths and some guitar countermelodies.

It’s one of the most difficult to play on the album and when I’ve tried it live a few times I haven’t quite got it right. In particular I keep getting the move from the final verse to the final chorus wrong. Not sure why, except the timing of it always seems to elude me. 

For a while Mirrorworld was going to be the first song on the album. I only changed it because I thought Nothing You Can’t Buy was a better opener because the vocal starts right at the beginning of the song, whereas Mirrorworld has an instrumental intro. But it was the first song I wrote for Worldbuilding and remains the blueprint for the album’s sound. 

Next up: Cuckoo.

Everything I’ve ever written has been about fictional worlds. I love fantasy, scifi, speculative fiction and my songs tend to tell those kind of stories. 

Sometimes it’s very obvious, sometimes it’s kinda oblique, but all my songs are from the point of view of a character, telling you about their world. 

So that’s what this first Ashfeathers album is about – 9 songs about characters in their fictional worlds.

But there’s also the idea of a ‘sound world’. The instruments, voices, textures and gestures you choose to create your music. So as well as building worlds with the lyrics, I’m building worlds with sound. World building. 

I’ve released 8 albums prior to this one, almost all under my own name – Tom Slatter. Ashfeathers has such a different sound world to those songs that I decided a new name was needed, and here we are. 

But the lyrics of the first song – Nothing You Can’t Buy – could absolutely have been on a Tom Slatter album. 

This song is about a city in the desert where you can buy anything – physical things, maps and knives, cages, cars, diamonds, hot dogs, but also abstract ideas like broken hearts, broken promises. 

The character singing revealed themselves to me gradually, pretty much as happens when you listen to the song. First he’s walking through this bizarre market, looking at all the weird stuff you can buy, but then the chorus comes he tells you he bought a map, a knife, someone else’s name and revenge. 

Cos you can buy revenge in this place. 

And despite the kinda sweet sound world – acoustic guitars and chimes and stuff, there’s something sinister going here. By the bridge he’s talking about accusations dogging your every move, and an old man in the market in the city you can pay to make your past sins disappear. And by that point you know this guy ain’t in a happy place. 

And it means you’ve got a juxtaposition I always enjoy – a singable melodic chorus with dark sinister lyrics. 

Cos by the end our character is talking about how he could have bought happiness, but to do that would mean raising someone he loves from the dead, and thats a pandora’s box, cos if one person can get raised from the dead, others can too and he can’t afford that. 

I assume cos he’s put some many people there and he doesn’t want to have to face them after what he did. 

Or something like that. Lots of writers will tell you, sometimes it feels lik the song or the story kinda takes over and you’re acting as a conduit for the words rather than creating them yourself. You are of course, except maybe with a bit of help from your subconscious brain – but that’s what it felt like when i got into writing this song. It wrote itself very quickly. Like he felt he wanted to confess to me. 

So that’s that first song ‘Nothing You Can’t Buy’. Next time I’ll talk about the second song, MirrorWorld.  

I am very happy to be supporting I Am The Manic Whale on 5th April at the Facebar in Reading.

I’ll be playing a solo acoustic set of songs about love, dancing, and ‘waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care’*.

Here’s the ticket link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/…/i-am-the-manic-whale-tom…

*This is a lie. I’ll sing about wizards and demons and murder and stuff. Obviously.

‘What are your influences? I’ve never heard anything like it.’ a guitarist called Andy said to me on Thursday night. I took this as a compliment. There was definitely not a look of fear in his eyes.

In the last seven days I’ve played two gigs.

Two? Two in seven days? I hardly ever play gigs, what’s going on?

It just so happened I was asked. Ever now and then I put a few feelers out to find gigs, but my main policy on gigging is that if someone asks I say yes, and apart from that I don’t really gig.

Why is that? Don’t musicians want to perform?

Yes, I love performing I would happily do it a lot more. But music is not my full time gig and I am committed to only doing musical things that bring me joy, given I don’t have bags of time to commit to it. At the start of 2022 I put a lot of effort into trying to find gigs. The result of that was I ended up with about 15 gigs in the diary for the first 6 months of the year, all but two of which never actually happened.

All right, it was bad timing. We were only just coming out of Covid, things were in flux, ticket sales were hard to predict. But that was an awful lot of time and effort spent on admin that could have been spent on new music.

So, for the moment we are back to my main gig policy. Do ’em if someone asks!

And that’s how I ended up playing the two gigs I did this week. Chris Parkins off’f London Prog Gigs asked if I wanted to support IT at the Camden Club, and Steve Jones (who I had contacted back in early 2022 during that rare bout of gig admin) who promotes Corn on the Cob, a acousticy, Americana ish night at The Hertford Corn Exchange.

The Camden Club is a new venue in an old building, having opened about 6 months ago. It is, it might shock you to know, in Camden, in that London.

The gig was a very civilised Sunday afternoon affair, with me opening followed by instrumental prog outfit Pandamoanium and the aforementioned prog ROCKers IT. I like IT, particularly because unlike a great many prog rock outfits, they don’t ignore the second half of that genre name and are happy to actually rock every now and then.

Pandamoanium were also lots of fun, great players with to my ear a bit of an Iron Maiden influence in chord and mode choices. Although that double-neck guitar had far too many strings. You don’t need that many.

My set was a mix of new and old – two songs off this year’s subscribers EP The Beast and Mr Knock plus a couple of brand new songs from the acoustic project I’m currently working on, including There’s Nothing You Can’t Buy. Here’s a video of that:

This was a great gig and being a prog crowd my weird stuff kinda fit in. No-one thinks you’re weird for playing songs in odd metres at a prog gig.

Corn on the Cob was also a great gig, but I was definitely more of a fish out of water there. I was part of the first act, which was a songwriters round – three acts on stage, playing one song each. I hadn’t done that before and I really enjoyed it. I was on stage with Pete Crossley, and Kate Ellis and playing right next to two other completely different songwriters was a nice contrast.

Now you may know, I like to get a bit of laughter from the audience between songs. I regard laughter as an appropriate reaction to the world cos let’s face it nothing really makes sense and being all serious about stuff is, well, unrealistic and a bit adolescent. So I introduced my silly songs in the way I usually do – this one’s about a brain in a jar, this one’s about evil clowns. And a few people laughed, a few people smiled. I think I got the right reaction.

Hard to tell isn’t it? I mean people laugh cos they think something’s funny. but they also laugh when they’re nervous or scared.

It was probably fine.

But then Andy, Kate Ellis’s guitar player did ask what my influences were as he hadn’t heard anything like it before, and there might have been a bit of fear in his eye. Hard to tell.

I’m sure it was fine…

My new song The Beast And Mr Knock is out now in all the places you might expect to hear a song. It’s an acoustic song about revenge.

Here it is on bandcamp.

Here’s Spotify.

We’ve all read the lists ‘best guitarist of all time’, ‘best bass player of all time,’ ‘Best Prog rock band of all time’. What do they all forget? ‘All time’ includes the future. But they never mention the best acts from the future. 

This brief article will hopefully redress the balance a little. Let’s dive into The Best Prog Bands of All Time (that were formed after 2025).

5. Jellyhoop Express

Formed after the original Jellyhoop/Blamp Collective disbanded due to bass player Felicity Argentine’s mysterious disappearance, Jellyhoop Express took the original band’s prog-funk soul to new heights. Fronted by Jellyhoop Lennon (no relation) and with the inimitable Ned Bladger on kit, and Gareth Cole on guitar, the band released many notable albums. 

Biggest hit: Can you funk in 5/4? A double album that dares you to dance in impossible time signatures

Deep cut: Napoleon gave me sugar lumps A 40-minute prog-funk retelling of the Napoleonic wars from the point of view of Napoleon’s horse. 

4. CoinBastard

The economic woes of the mid 2020s didn’t have many upsides, but the formation of economics themed Prog-metal masters Coinbastard is certainly one of them. Some bands write concept albums, but few have stuck to the same concept for quite so many albums. From Choked By The Invisible Hand, to Thatcher’s Corpse for Chancellor, the Wigan prog metal bands have been scaring and educating audiences for 23 years with no sign of slowing down. Expect tech-death riffs, blistering solos, brutal polyrhythms, and an album long screaming exposition of the macro-economic ignorance that led George Osborn to incompetently ruin an entire country.  

Biggest hit: Cutting taxes, cutting throats A history of taxation in 21/8

Deep cut: Reigning Keynes Slayer riffs and the essays of John Maynard Keynes shouldn’t go well together and yet somehow they do. 

3. Floatyhead

Cut from a very different cloth to CoinBastard, Floatyhead are a throwback to the glory days of prog – the 1990s. Lead singer and main songwriter Jim Bradford’s floaty falsetto and lightly strummed guitar are the centre and heart of this indie-prog band, but it’s the creativity, exploration and drive of the rest of the ensemble that truly give them their edge. From Gareth Cole’s guitar to Timothy Pickering’s oscillating basssynth, the group weave bizarre rhythms and bewildering countermelodies around Bradford’s self-indulgent whiny songs. Miserable, but epic. 

Biggest hit: Why do all the girls hate me? A tale of thwarted love in two simultaneous keys, with Pickering playing seven home made synth instruments at once. 

Deep cut: I was happy once but then my dog died and was eaten by a bear. An off-cut from their seventh album, and only released for the 20th anniversary 70 disc re-release, this was always a fan favourite at live shows. 

2. Mellotronitis

What can be said about Mellotronitis that hasn’t been said before? Pastoral mellotron soundscapes, slow, tuneful solos, lyrics about dragons and fairies.They would have been at home in any era of prog. Rapper and turntablist Jessica Longturk fronts the band, spitting bars at a hundred-miles-an-hour over the mellotron soundscapes the rest of the band conjure up, easily the most talented of the prog rappers since the genre finally embraced the hip-hop crossover it had been flirting with since 2027. 

Biggest hit: Gangsta Gonna Get Dem Elves. The prog-hop anthem that needs no introduction.

Deep cut: Guns and Hos in the Court of King Alfred. Knightly quests, mellotron solos, break beats and a ten minute excursion on what would happen if you used an uzi in medieval battle. Classic. 

1. Quantum Lariat

No surprises here. Quantum Lariat are the prog band’s prog band. Known for their commitment to the classic instruments of the genre, you can’t move on their stages for classic loop stations, guitar synths and drum machines. They’re not just about nostalgia though, Quantum Lariat are all about pushing boundaries. In 2032 they split into three different sub bands or ‘quantas’. One third of the nontet began playing their epic Three Marionettes One A Sea of Cheese while the other two quantas continued to compose the piece. There have been three band change overs so far and the piece is now into its fourth year. With the first batch of band clones currently in music school and the second batch currently gestating, their plan to still be performing the piece in 2000 year’s time seems to have got off to a great start. With seven births in the audience and only three deaths, the chances of there still being people in the concert hall to listen seem pretty good as well. 

Biggest hits: Supper’s Tongues in Transatlantic Oceans Their tribute to the epics of yore

Deep Cuts: Fountainhead or Milkshake? The band’s first attempt at a multi-year epic. The first three years are really captivating, especially for bass player Felicity Argentine’s mysterious reappearance in the middle of the twenty eighth chorus, but years four to seven are an acquired taste. Whatever was planned for years 8 onwards we’ll never known, as the audience uprising put an end to the performance and to several original band members.