Shock

We’re Berlin bound as we go to our second festival of the month. We’ve heard its absolutely pissing rain which is not the start we wanted but we’ve lots of late night drinking and clubbing on tomorrow to look forward too. A lie-in on Friday before joining the tail end of a 24 hour club where our friend and host for the weekend Mano Le Tuff will be DJing. More Melt tales on the way….

The Shapeshifters take on Orbital’s Chime, mmm

Watched a really great documentary on the 9/11 conspiracy theories on BBC the other night, and as entertatining is Charlie Brookers response to it! While I don’t wholly agree with everything he says its for more interesting than than Dylan Avery’s repetitive denials.Either that or Charlie’s part of the conspiracy too! So the government finally fooled us!

I’ve got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.
If your waking life is mundane, it’ll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they’re all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you’ll spend each night dreaming you’re the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.
All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you’re the Emperor of Pluto after you’ve woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you’re in trouble.
I mention this because recently I’ve found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the “controlled demolition” of WTC 7 (oft referred to as “the third tower”), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I’m the Emperor of Pluto?
The glaring problem - and it’s glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.
Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you’re talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.
It’s hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ’s sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.
That’s just one broad objection to all the bullshit theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they’ll pull a face and say, “Yeah, but … ” and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that “makes you think” (when it doesn’t) or “contradicts the official story” (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of “evidence” and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.
And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you’ve sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun “findings” before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.
Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there’s a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he’s wrong, do I?
Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find “proof” that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It’d certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone’s account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the “evidence” was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.
Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You’ve seen through the matrix! At last you’re alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!
Except - ahem - you’re only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the “system” is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that “the man” is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn’t give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that’s no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

Like us we hope your still fascinated by the 2008 presidential race. Has anyone noticed the increased use of Obama’s full name; Barack Hussein Obama on certain TV networks? Shades of 2004 are appearing already. What next, they’ll start saying he looks French?

The most recent issue of the New Yorker features an illustration of Mr Obama dressed in Muslim garb and his wife as a terrorist. In a statement, The New Yorker magazine said the cartoon “combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are.” but its increasingly damaging in a country where the only message that gets through sadly seems to be the most simple one.If I increasingly think is doubtful he is to win it will be a far tougher battle than even the primaries. But it will nonetheless make for great entertainment. Election night party anyone?

Dozens of partygoers at an outdoor rave near Moscow last week have lost partial vision after a laser light show burned their retinas.Moscow city health department officials confirmed 12 cases of laser-blindness at the Central Ophthalmological Clinic, and daily newspaper Kommersant said another 17 were registered at City Hospital 32 in the centre of the capital.

Attendees at the July 5 Aquamarine Open Air Festival in Kirzhach, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Moscow, began seeking medical help days after the show, complaining of eye and vision problems, health officials told Reuters.”They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80 percent, and regaining it is already impossible,” Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying.Attendees said heavy rains forced organisers to erect massive tents for the all-night dance party, and lasers that normally illuminate upwards into the sky were instead partially refracted into the ravers’ eyes.”I immediately had a spot like when you stare into the sun,” rave-attendee Dmitry told Kommersant.”After three days I decided to go to the hospital. They examined me, asked if I had been at Open Air, and then put me straight in the hospital. I didn’t even get to go home and get my stuff,” he said.Cosmic Connection, promoters of the Aquamarine rave, were unreachable and did not list contact numbers on their Web site.

Industry Web site www.laserfx.com said focused laser light can cause eye damage almost instantly.The owner of a Moscow laser rental company told Reuters the accidental blindings were due to “illiteracy on the part of technicians”.”It was partly the rain, but also partly the size of the laser. Somebody set up an extremely powerful laser for such a small space,” said Valentin Vasiliev, who said his company did not provide the Aquamarine lasers.  

So we all went to see Bootsy Collins on Saturday after a big team building dinner in the wonderful Winding Stair restaurant. Wasn’t actually that impressed with his show, it was a James Brown tribute, featuring ‘lil James Brown’! That really wasn’t the issue though, just looking at him put the biggest smile on my face! He is truly happiness personified! I could listen to his Bootsy-voice all day long! 

Good afternoon,
We’re being uncharacteristically healthy in our podcasting the last few weeks. These latest episodes were inspired from the fun we had picking music to play before the live set by John Cooper Clarke a few weeks back. A mix of the very obscure; The Higher Primaters, to the quite obvious; Public Image Limited. We could probably fill another 10 Podcasts with post-punk tracks but see how you get on with these first.

To get the Shock Podcasts just go to itunes store and search for ‘Shock Podcast’  or click here to subscribe through Feedburner or Click here to subscribe directly through itunes

Part 1 (Stephen Reynolds)

01. The Congos - Fisherman
02. The Clash - Armagideon Time
03. The Pop Group - She Is Between Good & Evil
04. Glaxo Babies - This Is Your Life
05. John Cooper Clarke - I Don’t Wanna Be Nice
06. The Slits - Shopllifting
07. Magazine - A Song From Under The Floorboards
08. Au Pairs - It’s Obvious
09. Department S - Is Vic There?
10. Virgin Prunes - Baby Turns Blue


Part 02 (Jon Averill)

01 Cabaret Voltaire - Stay Out Of It
02 The Specials - Friday Night, Saturday Morning
03 Public Image Ltd. - Public Image Ltd
04 John Cooper Clarke - Midnight Shift
05 Echo & The Bunnymen - The Cutter
06 Severed Heads - Dead Eyes Opened (Remix 3)
07 Television Personalities - Where’s Bill Grundy Now?
08 Wasted Youth - Rebecca’s Room
09 A Certain Ratio - Sounds Like Something Dirty
10 The Higher Primates - Taking In The Summer
11 Captain Sensible - Martha The Mouth

Here’s the new video for Jape’s single I Was A Man, directed by M&E with a little help from my brother Gareth.So he’s not a useless little prick after all?

Possibly, maybe, could be one of the best remixers ever is on way is over to play Shock club #010, as we team up with /\ Nightflight at the Button Factory for another great night. Although we’ve just found out we’ve to be in London that week so for the second time in two years we wont be at the show we’ve organized! 

Joakim is a great club DJ, we got to warm up for him at Poloroid in Leeds recently and he really impressed. You can here part of his in episode 11 of our Podcast. Limited ‘earlybird’ advance tickets are available now for a very reasonable 10eu here: