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Zube announce what is (as far as we know) a unique event, Rorschach
have released their first (count ‘em) four debut albums in 2007,
as far as we at Zube know this has never been attempted in the history
of the recording industry and we are sufficiently confident of this that we
are offering a free album for the first ten of you that can prove us wrong!
Priced at a bargain £7.50 including postage and packing, available HERE
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It's late. From south of the river I take the last train
out of Scratch Siding and head north under the old
terminus of the Necropolitan Railway. I'm on the Junction
Line and the only living soul in the last carriage.
I take out my book about viper flesh and pike jaw, to get
me in the mood, while I keep an eye out for Pigsticker
Cadmium and his gang of razor boys.
The carriage smells of old soot and carbolic soap. I yawn
and try not to nod. Before I know it the train has left the
tunnel at Sour Gauge Hill. It's raining when I get out onto
the High Road so I pull up the collar of my granddad's old
sleeveless leather jerkin, the one he wore at the carnage
of Hill 16.
I buy a shish kebab from a Turkman takeaway
and walk down the road eating, remembering the tender
refuge I found in this place ten years ago when one rainy
night I shared the narrow bed of a lonely girl I'd met in a pub
on the western canal. Soon I'm there and I walk up the wood
paneled stairs to the crowded backroom of the Orange Inn.
On a low cabaret stage Goat Boy, a hunched runner-way from
the eastern Prairies, charms his instrument with fingers and
pedals, while a disgraced cantor called Adam serenades the
dead who sleep in the sodden ground of the cemetery across
the road.
Paul one-point-five, a throwback from Saint Luke,
keeps the whole thing pinned to the floor with the white fang
growl of a bottom E-string. Pauly is the band's lukewarm water
specialist and a master of sensory deprivation. And D'Arcy's there
too, at the back. Beatific smile, great gob, real gone, pushing the
song, keeping it light with taps and tattoos to the sneer and the
high tom.
`This one's called Porn Star' shouts the cantor over a slurred,
slowed-down stomp that sounds like dog euphoria and smells like
the sweet orange of burnt sugar on the cusp of a false dawn.
This is it. `Think of it as science experiment,' he chants `we can
watch this one later.' And while he's singing, he's throwing out cards
a deck, to the people at the front tables, and every one of the cards
from is the ace of spades, except the one at the bottom which is a
sharp skull joker. The skinny strawberry blonde got that one.
I drank too much that night and woke up late the next morning
swaddled in a lousy saddle blanket on the floor of a railway arch,
surrounded by wooden cinder boxes, Fullers Earth and ballast grit. I
knew the arch.
It lay on the northern edge of the Trans-Europa Railroad
depot - a crime scene without a body - and all I had for company was a
thick head and a half-empty bottle of top-end prima-frost white spirits.
No more lonely girl.
The damp red brick perimeter wall was topped with
broken glass and I got over it by binding my hands with pipe cloth from
a roll I found rotting in the yard out back. As I jumped free I could hear
the sirens of the public safety board getting closer.