
I have to admit, this has made me happier than any press on the Clientele I have ever read. Guitargeek made a picture of my "rig"! It must have taken hours!
Alasdair's blog

I have to admit, this has made me happier than any press on the Clientele I have ever read. Guitargeek made a picture of my "rig"! It must have taken hours!

Due, rather strangely, to everyone on the bill wanting to go on first. Anyone who bought tickets for us can ask for their money back, I'm sure. Sorry to be a flake!! Here's a nice picture instead, of a remote house in Loch Glendhu in the Western Highlands of Scotland, where there are lots of seals in the water and no shops for 18 miles.












1.) I first stumbled across a photograph in the spring of 2005 whilst surfing on the Internet. I made further investigations and found out that it had first been published in the Sächsische Zeitung on May 2, 2002, in the local section for the district of Weißwasser, with the following caption: On Tuesday morning, at 6 am, the shepherd Frank Neumann made a gruesome discovery – he found about 20 sheep lying around in a meadow near the old railway line next to Mühlrose. Certainly not recommended viewing for anyone with a sensitive disposition. The animals’ throats had been torn open, and one of them had been almost completely eaten away. The sheep were all females; some of them were pregnant. The local authorities provided a tractor for the removal of the corpses.
2.) The case aroused my interest, and I looked it up in all the regional newspapers appearing around that time. On May 3, 2002, anxious inhabitants of Mühlrose and Weißwasser voiced their opinions: I always used to go and feed the wild animals in the woods around there. But I wouldn’t dare go there again now. Or: I shall tell my grandson not to go out on his own any more in the evenings. On May 6, 2002 three sheep disappear in the woods and the Dresdner Morgenpost gives as its headline “Whole Village in Terror!” On the same day, the newspaper Bild advises its readers to hunt down the attackers with rubber bullets.
3.) Continuing with my research, I found a press release by the Saxon Ministry of the Environment dated June 13, 2001, which was repeated more or less word for word on June 14 in the Lausitzer Rundschau: It appears that a pack of wolves has settled in an area covering approximately 700 square kilometers, stretching from the Polish border to Weißwasser. The adult animals followed an old wolves’ route leading from Rumania through Poland into Lusatia. One day later, the Sachsische Zeitung announced: The last wolf in Germany was killed in Lusatia in 1850. Now, 150 years later, the nocturnal animals have returned to their ancestral territory.
4.) At some point while I was going through all the press material, I noticed that there is not a single photograph of a German wolf (Bild) on the prowl at night. Newspaper articles are usually illustrated with pictures of animals living in captivity. So in December 2005 I made some enquires at the Wolf Office of the Free State of Saxony. Here it was officially confirmed that the movements of the pack of wolves and their hunting behavior in Lusatia had been reconstructed solely on the evidence of the tracks they had left behind – trails, droppings, and the remains of their prey. Of course, there are no historical photographs of wolves on the prowl, as the animals had been wiped out by the time photography was invented.
5.) I was fascinated. In January 2006 I decided to walk along the wolves’ route. I read up on all the relevant specialist literature and had a Lusatian forest warden teach me how to read tracks. He advised me to imitate the wolves’ howl in order to attract the animals.
6.) At the end of May 2006 I got myself an infrared camera. And on June 12, 2006, I set off walking from a place called Podrosche on the Polish border. On June 17, after walking for five nights, I reached Zosel near Weißwasser, 80 kilometers to the west, where in the meantime a second pack was said to have settled.
The wolves’ route is a sandy path, mostly leading through pine forests and birch woods. I began walking at dusk, using the viewfinder on the camera as orientation. I decided where I was heading for each night with the help of a map, usually choosing a crossroads where there was a small settlement, or at least a few buildings.
7.) To come straight to the point: it was very quiet in the forest. On my nightly walks, I saw nothing but deer, a herd of wild boars, and a small fox. And yet I did have a rather strange experience – every time I had reached my destination, I heard noises in the dark. I took photographs in the general direction the sounds were coming from, hoping to find something later when I blew up the pictures. I could have imagined it all, of course, but the next morning I always found the typical, straight wolves’ tracks in exactly the same area, like some kind of proof. Today I believe that I only came really close to the wolves at these places. They almost seem to have been waiting for me there. In an attempt to discover why, I looked for more information on my five nightly destinations.

NOAILLES: Perhaps the Last Judgement has taken place and we’re carrying out the punishment.
-Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles in conversation, printed in Harpers Magazine, Oct 2007
(I think maybe they are interpreting global warming and terrorism as a collective suicide, but who knows?)
Today, for reasons of my own, jetlagged and weary, I was fussing around the library in a small town where I grew up. Outside, the shopping centre we loitered around as teenagers is being demolished inch by inch, which gives the remaining shops a strange air of evanescence and uselessness. All the big companies, the chain stores, have pulled out – a fabric shop called “Material Goods” and a Christian bookstore / café hold out against the developers and the increasingly bleak autumn light and dead space.
So I wondered down to the library, and what should I find in star position, sitting incongruously at the head of a great flotilla of books on display, but “Complete Microwave Cookery” by a woman whose name I forget. This book, published in 1988, had been checked out many times in the 80s and early 90s but hardly ever since, and is dedicated to the creation of complete meals in the microwave. Hollandaise sauce, swordfish, rabbit, foie gras with crackers, you name it, here are instructions on how to make it in a microwave, and solely in a microwave. On the cover, the author stands showbiz-wackily in front of variety of dishes on a large trestle table, in the airbrushed suggestion of a manor house, with a lurid green shoulder-padded dress and bleach blond hair in a kind of horrendous Lady Diana doughnut-shape. It buried me in the 1980s with a sudden feeling of panic, and I remembered that they were no fun at all. I don’t think I could survive back there now, it would all be too alien, too incomprehensible, bright and stupid.
I walked through the mall for one last time, tracing the footsteps that my friends and I had taken when we were 16 and 17. A faint dizziness made me reel a little. The others, of course, are all elsewhere now, and their youthful ghosts seemed at peace. It struck me as I shuffled through, maybe we all actually ARE ghosts. Maybe the Last Judgement has already happened and nobody bothered to tell us. Letting me go on wondering around, trying to make sense out of nonsense, and talking to moronic Christians at bookstores, keeping me in hope and ignorance, that would be part of the punishment, wouldn’t it?
I returned to the library, wanting, for purposes of verisimilitude, to note the Microwave author’s name, but of course the book had vanished. I’m sure if I had searched their records there would have been no trace of it either. A clue, a small part of the world's infinite and secret catalogue, had been left out, then hastily hidden away. In some abstract sense, as I cycled home in the rain, I realised the attraction of engineering one’s disappearance and returning the world to the pure state it was in before one was in it.

I left England a few weeks ago, after a long night of thunderstorms that rattled the brick walls of the house, great sheets of black rain, metric tonnes of water falling. These were the beginning of the floods that gripped the news for a while (I noticed on one occasion, the Daily Mail blamed the government for the fact that rainwater isn't drinkable; I take my hat off to them).
We played the Benicassim festival in Spain, drinking in the backstage bar with friends, acquaintances, and some currently very famous musicians like the Arctic Monkeys, whose popularity is an enigma to me. Amy Winehouse's gothically silent 14 piece band accompanied us on the coach to the airport at the end of the weekend. She strode into a waiting camouflage-painted hummer instead. Her hair is big. I guess her music exists somewhere far in the background, at most a rumour, a trace, a sort of vaguely defined crutch which may or may not support the fact that people in the press are probably waiting for her to die, right as you read this. Pete Doherty's music occupies this kind of dream-space too. What legendary band was he in again? He's got that moon-calf look, a holy fool, Prince Mishkin with periodical drug busts instead of epileptic fits... wait..... no, hang on.... how does it go again?
So with such ugly mutterings I ran away, all the way to Australia! There, and in New Zealand, we played with Robert Scott, who you may know as a member of The Bats and The Clean. Bob was selling some of his (very beautiful) paintings from the merch stand, as well as hand-made CDRs, in between getting up on stage with a guitar and singing with his silvery, mournful voice. As well as being a New Zealand music legend, Bob also gives guitar lessons to kids and has a band that plays covers at weddings, stuff like Jonathan Richman. I vote Bob Scott for President of the World, with George Henderson of the Puddle as Minister without Portfolio. There’s a DIY ethic in New Zealand that’s so inspiring. If you want to write poetry you just write it and sell it yourself, if you want to paint you don’t moan cos there’s no gallery to broker your work, you just paint and sell your paintings at a merch stand or at the side of the road. The focus is on the making, not the reception, or the selling; all of which should be blindingly obvious but often seems to get corrupted and lost.
I don't know if artists should have values, or really ‘stand’ for anything. Today I think that what they should do is bear witness, in an almost Biblical sense, to what they see in their lives, in their psychic area, use their imaginations to conjure it back into art, show that they were truly here, whether anyone will be listening tomorrow or not. Cos I think a key doubts nowadays might be: 'am I truly here?' How the communication takes form, or what is said, well, choosing that is the fun part. But when art becomes a career, it’s surprisingly easy to lose your way and, shortly afterwards, your soul. Watching Bob at work reminded me what is truly important, and what I should just turn my back on.