C.L.O.W.N

While his peers and compatriots of the equally tender age of 18 were engaging in various worldly pursuits, the ill-fated Gavrilo Princip found himself grappling with the unfortunate diagnosis of tuberculosis. Learning of one’s impending mortality at such a tender age is enough to send any impressionable fellow off the beaten track. Combine this with a confluence of other factors—economic deprivation, an era of what the Germans call Gesinnungspolitik, and the seductive allure of fraternity offered against the bleak backdrop of Austrian imperial rule—and what do you get? Bloody murder, that’s what.

Ah, young Gavrilo, I suppose you never intended to set the whole world ablaze. Alas, the follies of youth! Boys will be boys, and sometimes, they change the course of history.

Clown

Sarajevo

It all just seemed like such an unnecessarily morbid affair. And what a way for a prophet to sever ties with this mortal coil, if you pardon the pun, than with a very high-profile decollation at a dance. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, my boy John, the lesson is clear: when you picked an unwise and foolhardy war of words with Herodias, you incurred the scorn of the wife of a king. You don’t f*ck with the Queen, whether you are a prophet or not!

‘And he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a plate, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother.’”

John the Prophet

“You know what they call people like you in these parts, Charlie? A w*nker. A right tryhard, tosspot little w*nker. Be under no illusions, boy, I had low expectations for you when I met you and you even failed to meet them. You lie around like a useless manchild with delusions of grandeur. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Charlie. Stop the drinking, the self loathing and the self-destruction. It’s about time you grow up and get a job before you turn yourself blind.”

Magazine Dreams

One would have thought time and fate might bring some improvement. There is no improvement to be found here. Alas, we remain as delightfully bewildered by our own incompetent instruments as a clown by his own sad makeup. Pray, turn that frown upside down, Mr. Clown. The gods must punish us, for our tunes tumble like acrobats from the trapeze. Our voices are weak, pitchy, and tuneless. Our guitars are out of time and often out of strings. They are always out of their depth and very often out of some dark, morbid hole you find yourself in at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday after a quiet pint on a Friday transcended into a little more than you bargained for.

You will find little cheer here to hear. No showmen. No beats to bop your brainless bonce to. No uppers, only downers. Only the melancholic drawl of broken dreams. The failed hopes of would-be artists. The damaged and recovering shells of talentless fiends looking for their next creative hit. Slinging mud to the vast and ever-growing musical walls of this infinitely expanding universe and hoping something will stick.

Hoping that one day, dear droog, through fate or happenstance, some unsuspecting devotchka or malchick may stumble across this unmerry mayhem of our musical circus, where the worst show on earth meets the strangest sounds you’ve ever heard.

Magazine Dreams

Wooznam and the Lickers