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… And for what will sadly be my final gig with Todger, due to the move to Canterbury:

I joined the mighty Todger on rhythm guitar about two years ago. Since then we have been playing in every toilet in London, perfecting our set for our new album: Last Of The Juggernauts, available now! Thanks to Mo Panella, and “Smokey Joe” Suarez, we got a really ace sounding record. To complement the music, I wanted something equally childish rocking, and so I set about making a custom devil truck, complete with succubi and zombies. I’m going to write a little more about that in a bigger blog post soon. Here’s the artwork:

The album is done, I’m frantically throwing artwork together, and this is where we are launching it. Facebook event is here.

New fictional band. New logo. New t-shirt! It can be purchased from my shiny new Redbubble account.

Totally studly and macho flyer for the first Tooting Bizarre gig in Croydon, at the Scream Lounge. Vanessa’s excellent Euro-Prog band The K!Nights Of Rad (website/myspace to follow) support.

I received an email from Nicholas Dobson, author of the very fine “Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook” and founding member of the ICS.

I’m building a huge playlist of ICS music, stuff people made with the 20-Song Game, and I’ve been giggling like crazy listening to your “Breakfast Cereal” song – an excellent example of what I like to call the “Instant Observational Songwriting” sub-genre of lodge music . Something very intimately hilarious about that session you did, very classic.

“There’s all these crazy traditions that have sprung up within the psychotic strictures of the 20-Song Game. Like “micro-filler”, which is the maniacal little songs people create to pad out their track list for the way, or the Self Reflexive Song, where the person sings about them self writing songs. Instant Observational Songwriting is like an externalized version of the latter, for those of us that can sing and play an instrument at the same time. I’ve heard lots of examples of IOS, and of course have joyfully produced lots of it myself, but I was having a hard time finding THE godlike example of it. I used one of my songs as an example of micro-filler, and so I definitely needed to find someone else’s song for IOS, so that I wasn’t hogging the glory by having all the educational examples be MY stuff. Hurray!

What could I do but accept? An honour indeed. Thanks to the ICS for some great times and some hilarious music.

Weirdly continuing the nautical theme from last year’s flyers, Tooting Bizarre is now in it’s third year (I think) at the The Miller.

A sad day indeed, but it will soon be time for me to leave the band I have committed creative juices to since late 2004. That’s five years, three albums, three music videos, one single, half-a-gazillion demos and 54 gigs!