Thursday, November 24, 2005

Dear Sucker

US Tour summary:

Tour very good. On returning to England, I had yet another predictably bad experience on National Express which ended up in my shoes, socks, bag and jacket covered in raw sewage. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my ongoing battle with this most complacent and arrogant of companies. Score so far:

National Express: 10
Nick Talbot: nil, excluding a £5 compensation voucher for a service I had told them I would never again be using. Stapled to the voucher was a note that read

Dear Sucker,

Yeah, whatever dude. We are fully aware of our total monopoly of the market, and are certain you'll be back. I mean, what else are you going to do when you need to get a coach from Bristol to Heathrow? Fly? Heh. Get a train instead? Only CEO's like me can afford the train. Please find attached insult, which you may like to add to your injury, loser.

National Express

P.S. Fuck you


Full story next issue.





Europe/UK tour:

30 Nov Leuven, Stuk, Belgium.
1st Dec Paris, Tryptique, France.
3rd Dec Amsterdam, Melkweg, Holland.
4th Dec Koln, Gebaude 9, Germany.
5th Dec Munich, Ampere, Germany.
6th Dec Zurich, G5 Club, Switzerland.
7th Dec Milan, La Casa, Italy.
9th Dec London, Islington Bar Academy, UK.
10th Dec Nottingham, Social, UK.
11th Dec Glasgow, Nice N Sleazy, UK.


Critical re-evaluation of the day:

"Cracklin' Rosie" - Neil Diamond's affectionate paean to the US equivalent of White Lightning, the favoured poison of the homeless alcoholic.

Tiscali Competition

Win a
Stagg Drum Kit, Stagg Electric Guitar and Amp and a Stagg Bass Guitar and Amp in a tenuously linked Gravenhurst competition, and watch the upcoming London show on a webcast:

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/music/competitions/comp11.html


Now you can be a power trio, like Gravenhurst, Husker Du, Nirvana and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Stagg also provide a range of delicious and wholesome canned meat dishes:




Bad Press

Uncut : "Early promise goes up in flames" heh heh.

Q: "Experimental songwriter experiments with tedium" That'll be Victoria Segal then, trying to decide which new scene she will be championing. Not ours, that's for sure. I'd love to meet her; i've never met a journalist who isn't wonderfully charismatic and charming in person, only to stab you in the back in writing. Janus-faced whores. Just like me.

Good Press

Many thanks to the excellent Mr. James Dellingpole for his praisesome Telegraph review. It's a shame the Telegraph sub-editor didn't read it, and in the headline described me as a shy young man who is worried about globalisation, when I make it clear in the body of the article that I am emphatically not worried about globalisation, and you'd have to be a dreadful judge of character to describe me as shy.

Pitchfork offered a very positive review, 7/10, though they did regard The Velvet Cell as an "Interpol clone", which means I must have pretty impressive powers of precognition as I wrote that song before Interpol had released a record. I am frequently staggered by hitherto unnoticed talents that just pour out of me like slugs from a discarded pair of swimming trunks.








7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aww, no date for Austria :( Not sure I'll be able to afford visiting Munich or Zürich...

Sorry for being such an uninspired commentator.

Anonymous said...

Welcome back. Was being severered from the internet for a month everything you'd hoped for?

Nick Talbot said...

Thanks Tom. Pretty much. The internet is an addiction. I'm trying to abandon Outlook and use a different method of office organisation. It's called 'pen and paper'. You write a list of things you need to do, and then when you've done them, you cross them off the list. The ideal result is a piece of paper with everything crossed out. I have also started avoiding email and instead using an older form of communication technology, the telephone. You phone people up and talk to them. Most business can be dealt with in a systematic manner, by having conversations. Deceptively simple.

I have avoided internet discussion forums. Waste of time. Stopped reading the news too. I have a manager now, and she is going to get up, eat and breathe for me. I'll be in bed, drinking Guinness and playing darts.

Anyone want to see my new hat?

Anonymous said...

welcome home...

i was the guy who spotted you at the black cat in washington dc after you were done with your set and commented that i heard the album before the concert and thought that the performances were really good.

and once again, the show was excellent... and don't let the pitchfork wankers get you down. actually just be grateful that they didn't compare you to say, the strokes or coldplay =]

good times

Adrian said...

On top on lacking in precognition, the fact that the Velvet Cell sounds nothing like Interpol should have been enough to stop them from writing that comment.

I find myself in a strange position of vague hindsight, knowing that the album title & at least 2 of the songs, in some form or another at least, are years old.

And yeh, I know. No review from me yet. Should have done a short review for New Noise, but I'm fed up with short reviews of albums that I could quite easily write 500+ words about. I'm hoping my new site will be sometime around the beginning of January, which should mean that an albums of the year type thing will still be timely, at which point I shall make amends.

Fires.. was my album of the year for New Noise, but I doubt that enough other people will have heard it for it to feature particularly highly in the collated results.

Anyway, hope you had a good tour, I'll be along on Friday.

Anonymous said...

Nick

My new left handed Stagg 'Jaguar' electric guitar cost about £100. Real ones made by Fender cost about £1000.

Nevertheless it is good for doing meandering bi-curious solos on.

[cries]

Come home... we miss you.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely loving your style of humor here. Actually genuinely 'Laughing Out Loud' and everything.
I was just looking for somewhere to comment on your performance at Nice 'N' Sleazy's on Sunday the 11 of Decmber there. And I'm patiently waiting on you to add me to MySpace (Battalioness :P).
Nice n Sleazy's was amazing. Hate the venue, loved the entertainment. I doubt you remember, but I was with the small crowd who kept heckling you to play The Diver. And you did. And I loved it.
Thanks for that. It really was amazing.
Also, adoring the new album. Which really doesn't need any explanation :)

Anyway, cheers, and I hope you get round to adding me :P

Faye xxx