Headers and Footers

"Favour the Brave" – Band Biography

It has been said that punk is dead; buried in an unmarked grave, littered with beer cans and syringes at the side of a road somewhere, forgotten by most except one or two addled survivors from the 1977 glory days. But stop a second and listen carefully. Point your ears towards the South East, and perhaps you will find that you can still hear a muffled bass drum pounding away at twice the speed of the human heart.

Pause and concentrate. You can just about hear a high-speed three-chord riff ripping apart the peeling walls of an underground sweat-box club; a throbbing bass line that shakes the head and causes compulsive circle pits. A vocal that makes you believe again; believe that perhaps punk is not dead after all. That life, not fortune, favours the brave, whoever they may be.

“Favour the Brave” are a three-piece punk rock band from Woking and Basingstoke, at times sounding reminiscent of the mighty Screeching Weasel, Black Flag or Leftover Crack.

Neil wakes the dead with his bass lines, whilst Stu brings off-kilter melodies and humour with his buzzing riffs and scathing vocal, and Joe skilfully beats his drum kit into submission at a thousand miles an hour.

The band work through an idea in two minutes or less, pinning it to the wall and leaving it to the audience to decide what just happened, like Technicolor snapshots of a riot.

They write songs based on their experiences and frustrations, applying their scathing punk rock microscope to life in the 21st century like mad biologists, smiling while they search for a cure to the ills that plague society.

Inspired by the best punk and hardcore bands from the last thirty years, NOFX, Lifetime, Dag Nasty, the Bouncing Souls and Kid Dynamite, “Favour the Brave” are a thoroughly English take on the scene, bringing their wry sense of humour to the party. They want to play a hundred songs in half an hour; they want to make you dance like you’re diseased. They believe.

And so should you. Go out, tonight, with a shovel and exhume your fossilized Mohican, buried next to that decomposing bag of glue at the bottom of your well-manicured garden, next to the dahlias. Turn off that television, put on those dusty Doc Martens you keep beneath the bed and go out and find that club, throbbing in the cold night air. You will find a salvation of sorts. You will find that, no matter what, life still favours the brave.

By David R J Sealey

"I Only Write About What I Know by Dresden Hypotenuse" Chapter Three - The First Men in the Moon

CHAPTER THREE – The First Men in the Moon



My first job was, aged 13, being sent up a chimney to clear away dead birds. I say birds, but they were actually three bald eagles that were, unfortunately, on fire and the pluralisation is misleading as I only had to perform the task once. I was paid thruppence and shinty for my troubles by a kindly old fruit with a bulbous round face like an overinflated cherry named, rather aptly, Mr Bastard. He smashed the coins into my outstretched shaking palm the way that an IT girl might gently smash her handbag dog to death on the pavement on a prescription medication binge; our sweat mixing and mingling with a fizz. I bid him farewell and took the charcoaled eagle corpses home to mother so she could bake a fine pie for tea.



The birds had become “on fire” due to a phenomena of nature known as “ball-lightning.” I must confess my only knowledge of this is based mainly upon hearsay and local whimsy, but lightning forms as an orb, floating above the ground. As it moves slowly from once place to another, it incinerates anything in its path. Scientists say that this is an unusual weather effect, but I, dear reader, now know differently. “Ball-lightning” is, in fact, the illegitimate son of TV Presenter, Noel Edmonds.



The result of a fling between Edmonds, his co-presenter, a Mr Blobby and the TV presenting wife-of-Fatboy-Slim, Miss Zoe Ball, backstage in the House Party green room, “Ball-lightning” (or “Ball-Edmonds” as it is now more commonly known,) was conceived and later born outside a butchers in Croydon. Sadly, the energy child killed a Miss Violet Edwina Hesselthwaite, 27, to death in a horrific scorching incident at the birth. Edmonds refused to acknowledge the child as his own at the scene, turning his back on the burning ball of electricity and waxing his imaginary moustache as it ran amok.



The “Ball-Edmonds” ran away that day, up, up far away, through the clouds and back through time as it travelled, until, at last, he landed with a soft bump on the lunar surface, a thousand years before he had set out. Reported only by a mad monk as portent of war, a message from an angry God, the “Ball-Edmonds” sat quietly in a crater, plotting his revenge.



The pie my mother baked was the most sumptuous exotic feast, the crispy bald eagle char adding a stark contrast to the buttery puff-pastry casement with oregano crust. I slept well that night; I remember that I dreamt of soaring high above the clouds, and higher still, my charcoal wings flapping with a biting crunch through the crisp night air. I felt as though I were floating, and then falling alternately all night long. It was a terrible night’s rest, when I awoke I felt that I had managed to snatch about an hour and forty-two minutes sleep in all, and also, felt rather surprised that I had woken up on the surface of the moon.



As I cast about my limbs in a desperate struggle to find oxygen, thrashing about in the lunar dust, I felt a sudden calm come over me and lay completely still. I felt as though I could almost hear something, so I stilled my struggling lungs and there it was, a lonely voice, whispering in the silent void of space. I couldn’t quite make out the words so I cupped my hands in time-honoured fashion and applied them to my rapidly-chilling lobes. The voice, amplified by the crude ear trumpet arrangement of my palms and fingers, appeared to proffer the following advice;



“Moon Pie Magic Pig Pizza’s are proud to offer you the chance to enjoy any two pizzas of any size for the price of one every second Tuesday of the millennia. Please eat responsibly. Free oxygen refills for any beast of any size upon the purchase of a regular Moon Pie Air-shake until the 27th of the First, 3011.”



I shook my head, and as I did, it felt as though my eyes were trying to float free from my fast-shrinking skull. Any idiot knew that, with the correct voucher, one could obtain five pizzas for the price of three on the equinox from any participating restaurant in the Universe. I fingered the aforementioned voucher in my jacket pocket and realised I had, in my frustration at the inaccurate advertisement, however, forgotten all about my imminent death from the lack of good clean air. So I stood up, brushed my crushed velvet trousers free of moon rock leavings and sauntered casually into the unknown landscape of the moon.



As I surveyed the yellow rocks, stark against the black void of space, I was surprised that I could see. A bright light shone upon the horizon, slightly duller than the Sun. It was a little chilly, so I drew my collar up about my neck and set out to discover what lay atop the lit mountain. I passed the detritus of clumsy American moon landing parties, the scattered flags and unsightly footprints that they simply couldn’t be bothered to clean up prior to re-entry, and forged onwards, past the wreckage of strange alien machines that looked like drills made of jelly, past a pile of boulders arranged to spell the word “cheese” that appeared to be made of ham and a giant tooth, shining white against the cosmos, until eventually, I came upon the foothills of the beacon.



I was astounded at what lay before me. It appeared to be a giant golden cat, asleep and purring yet, pulsating. I could at once see through the being to the lunar surface behind, and yet I could see its slobbering feline-esque mouth and twitching eyes. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable and held on to the pizza voucher tightly. As I backed away, I clumsily knocked against a stack of lunar hams which went down as you may expect by now. The hams clattered against the dusty rocks and the electrical tiger shook its great head, free from the grip of slumber, and stared right in to my soul.



“WHO THE DEVIL ARE YOU LITTLE MAN?” it roared, rather rudely. I dusted my sleeping tweeds down and adjusted my tweed sleeping cap before addressing him directly.



“Who am I you ask? Who are you, you lunar ruffian! I have a good mind to give you a good dressing down old chap. If you must know, my name is Dresden Hypotenuse and I am more than just a man. I am of a regular stature and I, sir, am a gentleman.

The gigantic lightning tabby made a sort of snorting sound at that, his fangs bared sparking venom.



“Come on then. Out with it, I’m not scared of you. My aunt Repuzela had fourteen trained tigers your size when I was growing up in Delhi, and they were made of pure fire!”



He grumbled and reared his head, and answered.

“I AM THE WORLD FAMOUS BALL-EDMONDS!” He jumped on to his hind legs and leapt up into the air.



“I haven’t heard of you old chap. Edmonds you say? You’re not related to Noel Edmonds by chance are you?” I was getting cocky at this point, jiggling from left to right in a rather provocative manner.



“DO YOU SEE ME WEARING A FUCKING GOATEE LIKE A WASHED UP MAGICIAN? I AM NOT A SEX OFFENDER!”



“No need to get fruity old chap, just wondering, inquisitive nature and all that.” I tried to placate the Ball-Edmonds. I could see the inner turmoil dampening his sad eyes, but his huge teeth were gnashing rather close to my face. I could feel the heat of a trillion volts circulating a house cat, mere inches from my right cheek.



Ball-Edmonds glared at me like that for a moment, and then turned his back suddenly before sitting down, his back to a stack of lunar Milano salami and sighing.



“EDMONDS, YES, NOEL EDMONDS. HE IS MY FATHER. I BURNT A LOT OF PEOPLE UNTIL THEY DIED SO I CAME HERE TO HIDE UNTIL IT ALL GOT BETTER.”



I admired Ball-Edmonds ability to open up to a stranger, a rare quality and an indication of a generous nature. I walked up slowly behind, and mimed putting my hand on his shoulder, from a safe distance of course. “No need to worry so old boy, I overheard a friend of a friend saying that your father was heard sobbing your name in his sleep a few weeks ago. He hates your mother, that harridan, but he loves you Ball Edmonds. He was even planning a television show for you to present. Go to him, go now! Find your family. You are forgiven.”



(Please allow me to clarify, I have never met that vile chap Edmonds, nor do I ever wish to. His horrible misuse of Schrodinger’s Cat enraged me so that I have not opened a single numbered box since the beginning of his evil broadcasts.)



“THANK YOU DRESDEN HYPOTENUSE. YOU ARE A GOOD FRIEND!”



With that, he swept away, over the hills of the moon and away, past the horizon and out, into the void of deep space. I was suddenly enveloped in total darkness, and the cold had begun to get to me. The old collar-up just was not enough for lunar conditions. I lay down to think, my belly rumbling.



When I opened my eyes, I was well-rested and back in my own bed, a steaming bacon sandwich with extra tartare dressing at my bedside table. I ate my breakfast and moved on. It is not healthy to dwell too long upon the events in ones past, and, besides, my wife had some rather pressing business that I had to urgently attend.

“I only write about what I know” by Dresden Hypotenuse

CHAPTER TWO – Big Brother

There are some moments in my life that I would rather forget. Some afternoons spent arguing with telephone call centres, mornings lost to the snooze alarm and especially those evenings I spent burning witches during the Spanish Inquisition. At times I’ve wished them all into nothingness, but it seems increasingly as if those moments are now the only things that I truly remember.

The afternoon of August 23rd, 1940 is one such blind spot that, regretfully, I do not yet have, although I am drinking regularly to remedy this. As my Sopwith Camel putt-putted gracefully from the clouds high above the English countryside, screaming fuel from a gashed fuselage, I knew that I shouldn’t light the Cuban cigar dangling temptingly from my lips. Johnson, my co-pilot’s head bounced heavily from the body of the plane like a gruesome metronome to counterpoint the rhythmic grinding of the stalled engine, and I am ashamed to say that I got quite caught up in the moment. I threw back my head and blew; a triumphant mouth trumpet solo to the raw backbone of my tortured rhythm section. As I reached my crescendo, I lit the cigar and inhaled deeply in order to blow a roaring smoke elephant star-ward, but the finale came much quicker than I had anticipated. The leaking fuel reached ignition from my sparking smoke sausage and the entire Camel became engulfed with white flame. I could hear Johnson’s screaming and took heart that he was still alive as we plunged, burning and witless, in to a lake.

As I sat there, trapped and drowning, I remembered the time when my brother, Timothy, had fallen overboard into the Thames from our makeshift outrigger. We had begged, borrowed and stolen the necessary wood and ropes and thrown the thing together, and this was to be our maiden voyage, before we set out to discover what lay beyond the Peak District. We packed our hampers full of cucumber sandwiches and ginger ale, and carved cannons from the shins of diseased cattle before we set out, along the great river Thames, and I remember fondly that it seemed a particularly warm shade of brown that day.

Timothy swung from the ropes, hoisting main-braces here and tying things down there, but I remember that I couldn’t be bothered. I sat down on the deck and cracked open an ice-cold ginger ale that was both refreshing and illuminating. As he worked tirelessly around me, I found myself wishing that he wouldn’t. Though I didn’t want to work and he did, and without him we would be floating in circles in some rotten estuary or other, I couldn’t help but feel my resentment towards him grow. His momentum made a mockery of my stationary status and that would not do.
He moved, faster and faster, giggling and tying, until it seemed that he had reached terminal velocity, reversing time which now flowed slowly, backwards.

As his ginger curls and ruddy face flashed past mine, closer and closer like some horrific haunted mirror, some stupid Fucky the Drunk Clown version of me from a parallel universe, I felt black anger and burning hot hatred at his sheer affront. How dare he mock me by allowing us to traverse water in such an effective manner while I simply lay about like some kind of dead beached whale? Did he hate whales?
I decided at that moment that I would rather die than live another day like this.

I stood from my seated position in the luxurious deck chair, making fists of my toes and kicking out hard, hoping he would die and know my glory, but I flopped ineffectively at his feet. He was moving backwards however, and came caterwauling and wide-eyed with surprise over my raised knees and tumbled over me and up and over the side of the ragged schooner. He seemed to float in mid-air for a second, just long enough to open his mouth to scream before he plunged, gob-first into the filth-riddled water of the Thames.

I looked around for something long enough to use as a boom, but the only other thing onboard besides me, the hampers and my very expensive Persian deckchair was a pot of cocktail umbrellas. Perfect, I thought, as I quickly bound four hundred or so of them together with locks of my own hair and fished his gurning, heaving body away from certain death. Unfortunately, as my crude tests later proved, he was already certainly dead.

When I held my pocket mirror against his mouth he did nothing but squeal and fit, so I held his nostrils shut to calm his rigor mortis, before he flopped limply and finally dead beyond doubt in my soothing hands. I am glad that I was there to see him through his final moments, to hold him fondly as I wept, but it has left me somewhat scarred. As my brother died, it seems that his teeth had slipped from the mirror to sink through my thumb, an injury I did not notice until that evening as I sat waiting for my starter to arrive in a hungry animal-based gastro pub.

Of course, the Police had questions for me, the dolts, on such trivialities like my name and why exactly I had felt the need to dropkick my younger brother from the deck of the boat that fateful day, or who had asphyxiated him as he lay unconscious after the incident, but I simply told them my side of the story and despite a frosty reception, I was soon on first name terms with an Officer Jonty Buttreiser, sharing laughs and doughnuts as we remembered some of the dumb broads we had made. We signed the release forms and he told me that if I ever needed some ass in this town to remember to give him a call. I agreed, shook his hand and tipped my hat to him as I left, to Jonty Buttreiser, the last real cop in town.

But of course, the real mystery is this: if Timothy did die that fateful die as I squeezed the air from his fitting body, who was the man that made me a steak dinner last Thursday? Why exactly was it that my dead and burnt up baby brother (we’d had him cremated) had simply come home from work a year to the day after I had strangled him? And why exactly would I ask you a series of questions that you can clearly never answer?

(Answers on a postcard to the usual address, please enclose a cheque to cover our £1.50 a minute premium rate reading fee. Your usual network rates do apply.)

“I only write about what I know” by Dresden Hypotenuse

CHAPTER ONE – A Brave New World

First of all I should tell you my name, although to careful readers it should come as no surprise. I am the aforementioned Dresden Hypotenuse, and recorded here, for posterity and some measure of ego, are the collected memories from my scattered years on this, the planet Earth.

I was born in Bridgwater, Somerset in the blazing summer of 1783 to proud parents, Hubert Hypotenuse and his lady wife, my mother, the honourable Lady Horatio Scrivens. My mother never took my father’s name, a matter of some contrition between the spritely young couple, despite their joyful union in December of the previous year. My mother, the heir to Sprugley House in the borough of Bridgwater, was of blue blood, somewhat at odds with my father’s employ as a rat burster. He would scurry with his small team of the disabled and dying at the vermin in the streets of the town with sacks of rice, exhaling mouthfuls of water and rice solution directly into the unsuspecting rodent’s gullet with the expected result.

My mother was a strange juxtaposition of personalities; an angry wasp in sheep’s clothing, vicious and brutal, yet compassionate and generous. She would often whip the servants of Sprugley House with metallised birch twigs whilst feeding them honeyed walnuts for offenses as minor as an untied shoe. She was shadowed everywhere by her loyal maid Dreseldeen, a woman who appeared consistently ninety years old from the moment of my birth to the present day, as I sit, writing this memoir with the rust of my own blood on old bits of tin foil.

My mother once told me that she had been rescued from wild foxes by Dreseldeen as a baby in a basket, in the woodlands north of Staines, and that Dreseldeen had been at her side since that day. Some evenings as a boy, I remember seeing my mother and Dreseldeen embracing deeply in the shadows behind the door in the scullery whilst my father picked the bones of the day’s rats from the raw skin between his knuckles. As the two women kissed and fondled each other, I wondered if my mother loved my father, or really did she love this mute old woman with a face like a boiled toad that groped her in dark corridors, and as I did, I felt something small, but significant, snap in the back of my skull.

My father hated Dreseldeen. When she wasn’t looking, he would pull offensive tongue faces and twist and contort his fingers into rude gestures, some made up, such was the wrath of his silent fury. He once told me that he would often imagine the rats that he burst had the head of Dreseldeen, and that he was really “bursting her fucking fat guts out.”

He had a quick temper and a rotten mouth, easily jumping to profanity in times of great emotional trauma. At the birth of my younger brother, (whom I will come on to in around two paragraphs time,) my father, who had been absent from my birth, ran screaming from the room past me in the waiting, room uttering the unforgettable; “Let me out! Her whole fucking arsehole just collapsed!”

I sat and pondered his words on many cold and lonely nights since that day. Of course, now I know the anatomical in’s and out’s of child birth thanks to my training in an underground Vietnamese tunnel hospital near Saigon, in nineteen hundred and seventy two. In those tunnels especially, his words echoed from the walls like the shells landing in nearby woodland. I had suffered terrible, crippling embarrassment around women since that supposedly joyous day. As the rumbles died away, I would lie still on my bunk and ask myself, God and nobody in particular if I would ever find love. The answer always fell immediately, an echoing vacuum of concussion.

Obviously, I was heavily hooked on opium throughout the conflict, often falling asleep with my hands inside a patient’s chest cavity and dreaming that I had opened my very own sausage factory as he lay screaming, awake and dying beneath my laughing fingers. I saved more lives than I lost, thanks to a mixture of Chinese I-Ching, common bleach and pure, magical luck. Before the conflict, I had received my First Aid badge at Cubs, aged nine, and this was considered more than enough proof of my medical credentials and prowess by the US Army. But I digress.

My younger brother was christened Timothy Jonathan Rosenbaumandsons Hypotenuse later that year in a ceremony that bored me very nearly to death, though I was always a sickly child to be fair to the vicar. Aged four, I wanted to be outside, kicking at pigeons and shaking sticks at the old and infirm with my friends from the house down the road, but instead my father would drag us to Church every Sunday and for special occasions like the christening. It was spoken of in hushed tones every day from Timothy’s birth as my father would meticulously plot the routes of guests, seating plan synchronisation and other such detail in his study, bare-chested and clutching at his St George pendant.

Sometimes I think that my brother was born to make up to God for me. My father was a deeply religious man, but my mother said that he only been that way since my birth. Before, when they had first met, my father had been a deviant, full of cheek and pranks and crude sexual needs. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck that read “God is Dead. Thank Fuck,” that he would later grow his hair into what would become known, in his honour, as the mullet, to cover. This had always confused me as my father would dress us in our Sunday best and drag us, sometimes screaming, to the little Church at the top of the hill, a smile on his lips, but a cold intensity in his eyes.

Something had gone wrong at my birth. The only thing my mother would say, once, with a shudder, was something inaudible except the words “the fire.” She couldn’t abide anybody screaming in her presence and once drop kicked a six month old baby through her bedroom window for crying as she “looked after it” for one of the serving girls. She had turned to look at me sat aghast, lips quivering on the chaise-lounge with a look that told me how close I was to a nice drowning in the moat and I quickly buttoned it.

As she hugged me and cooed about my curly hair, I resolved to never cry in her presence again. This philosophy served me very well, until one black day that will become apparent through the art of narrative at a time of my choosing in our joint future. That is correct, I, Dresden Hypotenuse, control the destiny of time and space itself in our literary marriage. I wear the trousers and cardboard crown in this relationship. You, reader, would do well to remember that. You are my bitch now. Unless of course you stop reading and throw the book out of the window and go and slander me to all your friends in the critical media like Garry Bushell and Piers Morgan. But, if you do go to do that, know this. You shan’t be missed.
Now that we have sorted the wheat from the chaff, I shall continue. You, my sweet, loyal friend, are to become privy to my darkest secret. After the following commercial messages, that is

Snow

A single flake falls, freezing a trail,
it lodges, pitched upon the wall,
icing uneven grey stone defiant,
it waits for its brothers, alone.

Not for long; a flurry of activity
follows and they hurry along,
drifting in winds, winding down
to settle, together, a new home.

They blend together, stronger
to cover the wall and spill over,
to erase frozen leaves and mud
and to make a child’s day

and they all come out, hollering
and happy, rolling balls of snow,
they play where we see misery,
laughing as they become men.

Pedestrian-Iced

Walking in a winter wonderland is a terrible lie,
we remember slipping and sliding along paths
as cars, bikes and buses flew by, roaring past
expelling hot gases that melt further the roads
whilst Mr and Mrs Pedestrian fall on our asses,
bruising our dignity as engines laugh past us,
ruing that salt, peppered thickly across two lanes,
that leaves us, high and icy and stuck in last place.

“Use the buses, use the trains, they’ll be fine,”
yeah, if they actually ran on time, or in snow
but we all know public transport slides to a halt
and it’s your fault you’re late, you should’ve left
home yesterday to get there five minutes before
your shift began, and you arrived broken anyway,
useless and sodden, while out of their cars step
those bastards that left you to die in the mist.