Come ramble with me…

I always mean to write more of these weird ranting things before I realise the potential crux – who the fuck wants to read this shizzle? Well, my mother for one since I never send her emails or pick up her phone calls and this is the only way she knows I’m alive, how much I’m drinking (she counts the number of times I write the ‘hungover’ and then shouts this on a voicemail) and where I am in my ongoing psychological darkness. Which is somewhere between a raging bonfire and a sputtering candle, depending on how much tighter my jeans are today than yesterday, where the moon is in its cycle and how many people I decided to fantasy-beat up on the Tube that day.

Right now I’m crunching on the salt left at the bottom of a pretzel packet (which means I’ll have to sleep with a trough of water next to my head to slack my immense thirst every 30 minutes) and listening to The Tindersticks. Now if you haven’t experience the brilliance of this band, then I insist right now that you go here: Tindersticks – Her – BBC In Session – John Peel 27/04/93 and improve your life tenfold. When I listen to this band (also see Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Chris Isaak), I feel like I need a bottle of whiskey, a pack of Marlboro Reds, a black eye, a gun and a really hot demented boyfriend who drives a beaten up truck and wears his Raybans at night. Just me? Oh, okay.

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Last night I watched the dreamy Professor Brian Cox and his schoolboy hair present another episode of Wonders of the Solar System and as much as I thrilled to the core with this kind of geekery, it never fails to make me feel the tickling of a panic attack. I’m not stupid, so why can’t my brain grasp the mechanics of physics?? What kind of thinking does a physicist have? Obviously where the concept of infinity doesn’t make them reach for a paper bag to hyperventilate into and a bottle of frozen vodka.

As Professor Lovely Hair explained the creation of our solar system (big cloud, gravity, swirling, explosion, sun and go from there), all I could think of was, that’s great but before the sun arriving, before the nebula, there was just space…. where did that space come from? And what’s beyond space? Imagine that you’re in a box. And you climb out of that box and you reach another box. You climb out of that, and there’s another box… but where did the bloody boxes come from and how many are there? I don’t imagine that before space there was nothing but a big white room. Like an empty Ikea. Just waiting for some flat-pack galaxies to be dropped in from… a parallel universe?????? *scream* Make the existential thoughts go away, daddy!

After that was over (yes, Sunday was a very lazy day, spent the entire morning gasping at Ben Barnes’ exquisite face in Easy Virtue), there was a Blur doco on. Ten minutes of this confirmed what I always thought – what a bunch of morons. If Damon Albarn is intimidated by the giant smug trollface of Will Self, then he is either trying to pretend he is still aligned to the Every Man or he’s stupider than a suitcase full of hair. Either way, you want to punch him. Plus, has he got a gold tooth now? What is he – a gyppo or Lil Wayne’s chav brother from another mother? Seeing a whole pile of fat and sweaty old men jumping around to ‘Boys and Girls’ made me think ‘there are some terrible problems in this world – famine, AIDS, poverty, global warming, me spending precious life minutes watching fetid middle aged people ‘avin it large.’

So today was the arrival of the new edition, the one with Chew Lips on the cover. It’s completely exciting. Well maybe not like ‘I’ve just won the lottery exciting’, that would trounce a new mag most definitely and I’d be off to LA first class where I’d buy the house I’ve always wanted and throw a lot of parties where I’d wake up and there would be people sleeping in the bath and someone would have eaten my goldfish on a dare. But the new mag is always a total hell yeah/thank fuck moment. Then we sit there, nervously wondering if you lot will like it. This one is important because it has one of the hardest interviews I’ve ever done – that being Messrs Leto and Milicevic – and with a fanbase like the Echelon, you don’t want to fuck it up but neither do you want to gloss over the interview and turn it into something it’s not.

It wasn’t easy… trying to peel back the layers that have already been discovered and find new things when the interviewee isn’t too keen on letting you go there can result in a lot of small talk and not so much divulging. There were a few moments where I even got to play school marm’ and demand we all get back to the matter at hand and could Tomo stop challenging me to a staring competition! I’m a girl with 2000 words to write and eyeballing each other does not maketh the world’s greatest interview. So (I hope) this captures the high, lows, reveals and dead ends that the evening entailed and how damn intriguing and frustrating that was! And once again cheers to those hard-tweeting fans who are telling their mates about the mag.

And on that note, I bid you au revoir!!