HAVE A SUGAR & SPICE XMAS, 2023

 

A WISH FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS WISHING WELL

FOR LOVE IN A PEACEFUL WORLD

'ANDREW DARLINGTON'S ETERNAL ASSASSIN'

AT LAST, THE FULL AND

UNEXPURGATED PUBLICATION

OF:

'ANDREW DARLINGTON'S

ETERNAL ASSASSIN'

...a slim Dark Mood-Fantasy in the tradition of

Michael Moorcock or Jack Vance, 

(28pp) fully illustrated by

JAMES CAWTHORN

exclusively available from

Spectre Press

56 Mickle Hill

Sandhurst

Berkshire

GU47 8QU

ISBN: 0-905416-08-2

(all proceeds to charity)

Check out this review on 'SOUNDCHECKS'...

Album Review of:

‘WHEN I’M PRESIDENT’

by IAN HUNTER & THE RANT BAND

(Proper Records PRPCD104)

www.ianhunter.com

‘Ello’, Mr ‘Unter positions himself between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the run-up to the White House, and states his manifesto in no uncertain terms. It’s a mighty long way down Rock ‘n’ Roll from his Mott The Hoople hit-making days, but Ian Hunter’s twentieth album still carries the distinctive charge of his finest work. He was part of the first postmodern Rockists. Steeped in Rock ‘n’ Roll so it’s rhythms and references come as naturally as breathing. Ignited by 1950’s Rockabilly, sharpened by 1960’s R&B grit, topped off with 1970’s mix-and-match sensibility, it’s achieved its own timelessness, folding in slight quotes and nods to what had come before without effort, almost without pre-thought. It is his first language, his vocabulary of choice. Both fan and practitioner he was always one of its finest chroniclers. He’s always stayed true to his calling, and seldom strays from its poles. But if anyone captures the sheer essence of the Rock ‘n’ Roll life better than “All The Way From Memphis” or “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” I’ve yet to hear them... Read the full review at:

 http://www.soundchecks.co.uk/reviews/ianhunt1.html 

Simon Clark's 'Blood & Grit 21'

'BLOOD AND GRIT 21'

Short stories by

SIMON CLARK

‘Why is it called Skinner Lane? Why … because

that’s where something called the Skinner lives’

Internationally renowned horror novelist Simon Clark returns to his roots with a new edition of Blood and Grit, the short story collection that launched his career twenty-one years ago. Together with all six original tales, Blood and Grit 21 features the haunting ‘… Beside the Seaside …’, Simon’s first professional sale, while a brand new story takes us back to the iconic ‘Skinner Lane’. In a new illustrated afterword, Simon recounts how the original book came about and reveals the locations that inspired its stories. Last but not least, this new edition includes the original foreword by Andrew Darlington, who also provides a brand new introduction that’s a rousing celebration of Simon’s career to date.


Contents:
Simon Clark: Nailed to the Genre

(Foreword to the new edition by Andrew Darlington)
Blood and Grit
Raising the Chill Factor

(Foreword to the first edition by Andrew Darlington)
Skinner Lane
Out From Under
Over Run
Bite Back
Revelling in Brick
Sex, Savagery and Blood, Blood, Blood
Extras
Twenty-One Years Later – Afterword by Simon Clark
… Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea …
21 Skinner Lane

In Paperback or iBookstore format

Screenshots

http://www.bloodandgrit.com/

'Angel Body & Other Magic For The Soul'

In case you missed it first time round, the BBR speculative fiction anthology 'Angel Body' is half price on Amazon UK for the next 7 days: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1872588050/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new Described by Paul Di Filippo (Asimov's SF) as "one of the best original anthologies of the year", it contains an introduction by David Memmott, stories by Don Webb, Andrew Darlington, Lance Olsen, Brian Evenson, Thomas Wiloch, Ernest Hogan, Scott Edelman, W. Gregory Stewart, Mark Rich, Tom Whalen, Lorraine Schein, Mark Bilokur, Misha Nogha, Denise Dumars, Conger Beasley Jr, and Bruce Boston, plus poetry by Lee Ballentine, Nathan Whiting, Steve Sneyd, Dan Raphael, Sandra Lindow, and John Noto. Offer ends next Monday 19 December 2011.

Amazon.co.uk: Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul
www.amazon.co.uk

Book Review: 'Earth Abides' by George R Stewart

The Last American

George R Stewart’s 1949 book 'Earth Abides'

examined by Andrew Darlington

Although published in 1949, George R Stewart’s sprawling epic Earth Abides was neither the first, nor the last fiction to delete homo sapiens from the world. For Stewart, it is a virus that wipes out the human race. But mass-extinction had been a popular theme for writers at least since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in 1826, in which a viral-plague devastates civilisation, followed by the awful anguish of Matthew Phipps (MP) Shiel’s sole inheritor of a world depopulated by The Purple Cloud (1901). After Stewart’s novel the Cold War thermonuclear confrontation gave atomic catastrophe the added frisson of terrible political relevance, with world-ending cataclysm brought about by a regular arsenal of frightful doomsday weapons. In fact, Stewart alludes to global war as his character – Isherwood Williams, muses on the irony that ‘the trouble you’re expecting never happens’. People have ‘been trembling about destruction through war’, and ‘having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces’, but that ‘it’s always something that sneaks up the other way’. It’s an idea that’s been picked up and re-envisioned numerous times since in various inventive ways, with humanity variously drowned, grilled, frozen, irradiated, crystallised, burned and eaten by perambulating plants. Stephen King acknowledging the influence of Earth Abides on his The Stand (1978, revised 1990), with echoes up to Will Smith’s cinematic last man in New York in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend’ (2007), or the ongoing Twenty-Eight Days Later movie series (2002 & 2007)....

For Full Feature Go To:
http://www.thiswayupzine.blogspot.com/2011/11/last-american.html

Movie Review: Elvis Presley 'Blue Hawaii'

'ELVIS PRESLEY &

THE BEACH-BOY BLUES'

‘Ecstatic Romance! Exotic Dances!

Exciting Music! In The World’s

Lushest Paradise Of Song!’

There are two perspectives you can use to look at ‘Blue Hawaii’. The first is as it must have appeared at the time of its release, in relation to what had come earlier. The other is with hindsight, knowing what would come later. Both perspectives are useful. Elvis had a tendency to complacency. With good reason. When he felt challenged, when he felt his status was threatened, he was well-capable of retaliating with work of extraordinary intensity. As with his so-called ‘67 Comeback TV Special’, launched when his career was at its lowest post-Beatles ebb, and designed to vindicate his intensity as a live performer. Problem was that for much of his career his position as the planet’s biggest music-star remained unchallenged. Whatever slapdash dross he chose to inflict sold just as many copies as his best and most groundbreaking work. The unquestioning loyalty of the fans who bought up everything with his name on it meant he had no real incentive to try harder. And because he didn’t have to try, he didn’t try….
Full review and background history of Elvis Presley: ‘BLUE HAWAII’
Go to:

www.videovista.net/reviews/nov11/bluehawi.html

ANNE CLARK does my poem "PSALM" Live

When I did my poem “PSALM” on-stage at Preston I said it wasn’t available on MP3 - apparently I was wrong! It seems that the very lovely and uniquely talented ANNE CLARK has done a version of it as lyrics on this track from her CD ‘THE SMALLEST ACTS OF KINDNESS’. She’s even done a live version, which you can watch here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CSS7sNM0WI

original album version here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBvpbjs7-Ns

'I Was Elvis Presley's Bastard Love-Child' Video-Clip...

Okay, this is a shameless self-promotion, a crude bit of ego merchandising... but what the hell, it's fun too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLoQCMbl4dQ&feature=related

I was Elvis Presley's love-child

www.youtube.com

Three decades of free love and music journalism

'I Was Elvis Presley's Bastard Love-Child' Interview

ELVIS PRESLEY’S BASTARD

LOVE-CHILD - THE FULL

SHOCKING TRUTH

by

TRISTAN TROTSKY

Frank Zappa said ‘writing about music is like

dancing about architecture’. ‘I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S

BASTARD LOVE-CHILD’, collects eighteen music

interview features, revisiting highlights from twenty

years of on-the-road journalism, including

conversations with THE BYRDS, LEFTFIELD,

THE STONE ROSES, LED ZEPPELIN, THE KINKS,

GRACE SLICK (of JEFFERSON AIRPLANE / STARSHIP),

SIOUXSIE, CABARET VOLTAIRE and many more...

this is the sound of dancing architecture

‘False-colour photos from the dark side of Uranus. A switch-back of black rings no unlensed eyes have yet seen, a dance of ten new unpaced black moons in lost frigid orbits, beautiful and complex... but what the hell FOR? For whose benefit? If those moons, those rings, didn’t exist would it REALLY upset some vast eternal cosmic plan? The system runs in total impersonal isolation, according to its own illogics and for the apparent benefit of no-one. A Wonderful and Frightening World... like the Fall. Ring-systems of black vinyl noise across some ten albums, a spatchcock of LP’s with tracks not so much posed or even composed – more decomposed. A more extensive back-catalogue than that racked up by either Velvet Underground or the Doors. But a band hermetically sealed off in its own space-time continuum run on its own devious motives. As real, and as irrelevant as Uranus. The Fall are something of an enigma, and one worth probing...’ (extract from the chapter interviewing the Fall’s Mark E Smith)

‘Music is like acne. Zits. Teenage spots. In the vast eternal cosmic scheme of things, it’s not very important. But if it touches your life, if it affects you, if it alters your relationship with the world and with other people, then it’s important. If it’s important to you, then it’s important.’ Andrew (on the book-jacket, Andy in the flesh) Darlington’s current book is called ‘I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love-Child’. Published by the ‘Critical Vision’ imprint of Manchester’s fiercely independent ‘Headpress’ it’s a glossy package made up of eighteen revised music interviews, personally selected highlights lifted from over twenty years of Music Journalism, and a life-time of slavery to the rhythm. And these are brain-biting, body-popping, paradigm-morphing, genetically-modifying, phase-realigning, gravity-neutralising, gender-reassigning, semantics-defying, shape-shifting, DNA-tingling pieces of Sex, Speed, and ‘See-You-Later-Alligator’ jive. ‘Andy is a poet, but he is also an intrepid pioneer at the edges of all things creative and life-affirming’ enthuses SF writer Michael Butterworth in his full-on foreword, ‘he is editor, publisher, journalist, writer of fiction, promoter /entrepreneur, Poet-for-Sale, often simultaneously’.

But ‘I was essentially a fucked-up adolescent,’ Andy confides in person, here and now. ‘I was wrecked on trashy Rock ‘n’ Roll, cheap Science Fiction, and masturbation. When I should have been doing homework revision for Algebra and French, I was memorising chart positions, B-sides, matrix-numbers. Compiling my own charts. There’s this thing now of saying ‘better than sex’. Football is ‘better than sex’. A movie is ‘better than sex’. For me – nothing is better than sex. But music – and books, have been more profoundly life-changing to me than any other artificial stimulant I’ve ever encountered. Even now, whenever I’m feeling bad, down, depressed, I whack on the Ramones, the Electric Prunes, Flamin’ Groovies, Prodigy, turn the volume up to eleven, and it gets me high. It never fails.’

‘What I’m essentially doing now, with this book, is sending a message back through time to that fucked-up kid that I was then, a message to say – hey, it’s alright. What you did then kind-of worked out OK.’ So what truth is there behind the title? The genetic lineage to Elvis Presley? ‘OK – I admit it. This book is based on a lie. It is not true. There was no Elvis Presley sperm involved in my conception. Sorry – does that mean I have to give the advance back...? But no, there’s enough truth there to exaggerate into reality. Which is what you do when you write these things. A story. A feature. You take an element of yourself, and you exaggerate it until it becomes a kind of focal point. The first chapter of the book is the most directly autobiographical. It’s all autobiographical in the sense that this is the music that has defined my life. Each chapter embodies as essential part of my life. Each chapter takes another little piece of my heart.’

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll is the ‘Schoolboy Crush’ you never grow out of. When Little Richard said ‘Awop-Bop-A-LooBop-A-Bop-Bop-Bop’ it was a shining truth expressing everything that later – more articulate, poets like Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Eminem never could, containing all you really need to know about Life, the Universe and Everything. It by-passes the logic centres of the brain and homes in direct at the non-verbal universal core of truth. The man don’t know, but the little kid inside you understands.

‘But the first chapter – the Elvis one, is the most directly narrative one. It’s true that I didn’t meet my ‘biological’ father until I was sixteen, and even then we didn’t really hit it off on any meaningful level. And – particularly during the mixed-up confusion of adolescence, you’re trying to interpret sexual behavioural codes through whatever role models you have available. And I was picking up twisted warped encryptions of it. As part of what was essentially a single-parent family in the early 1960’s, all my influences tended to be overwhelmingly female. Which is not necessarily bad. It gave me a heightened awareness of the feminine perspective. Which is no bad thing. But at the same time it came into direct conflict with other elements that I was already encountering, attitudes and gender double-standards which contradicted a lot of that. In the Elvis Presley chapter I use the mock-comic example that Elvis presents through movies like ‘King Creole’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – simple, one-dimensional images, as a way of getting through it. So no. It’s not true in the absolute sense. But sometimes truth can come in strange disguises. And there’s enough truth it there to fabricate what I hope is a comic-absurdist and not-unperceptive feature. But there is an accidental Elvis theme to other bits too. In the dressing room at the back of the Irish Centre in Leeds, Ian Hunter (of Mott The Hoople) relates this long anecdote about how he was in Memphis doing a gig, and how after the concert they drive out to see Gracelands – Elvis’ mansion, and when they’re refused admittance, Ian climbs over the wall and breaks in anyway. Then Robert Plant explains how Led Zeppelin got to meet and duet with Elvis in a Las Vegas Hotel suite. How I shake Robert Plant’s hand. The hand that shook hands with Elvis. So how – by proxy, I get to shake hands with my REAL father.... ‘

‘And, as we speak backstage at the Wakefield ‘Pussycat’ club in the lost wastes of West Yorkshire, it is EXACTLY twenty years to the month (22nd June 1965) that the rarefied stratospheric harmonies and janglipop Rickenbacker guitars of “Mr Tambourine Man” peaked on the British chart at no.1, over the likes of the Yardbirds (“Heart Full Of Soul”), Elvis Presley (“Crying In The Chapel”) and Joan Baez (with Phil Ochs’ “There But For Fortune”). It stays there two weeks, to be deposed only by the might of the Beatles’ “Help”. In those far-off time-lost days a 45rpm single costs a precise 6s 8d. And on a personal note – I get stranded in the Hull city centre with just enough carefully hoarded pocket-money either to go to ‘Hammonds’ Record Department with its luring listening booths to make the purchase I ache to make, or to pay for the long and winding bus-fare home. So – inevitably, I walk all the miles back clutching that orange-labelled CBS Byrds single tightly in my hand. For the Byrds – their harmonies carried on the futuristic mystique of Dylan’s methadrine-fuelled poetry, horizons seem infinite. The epitome of Beat Hip with Mod(ernist) Cool. In their first promo shots they are five immaculately aloof fringes posed ‘WITH THE BEATLES’-style out of the black. Superior. Articulate. As cool as every promise of tomorrow. A band of awesome vision and wondrous innovation, who opened the dayglo floodgates to all things West Coast esoteric and ultra-Hip, the Byrds personified, and made flesh, a seismic shift in popular culture that still reverberates now, across decades, up – to the Stone Roses, down – to Travis and Teenage Fan Club. Pop seldom came better ...”
(extract from the chapter interviewing Byrd Gene Clark)

So how did you get into Music Journalism? ‘Well, I was always writing. And I was always listening to Music. As far back as I can go. But essentially, through the 1960’s, I was a consumer. I was living in Hull. And I saw all the big bands who came through. It was odd in the sense that other kids I was hanging out with would go to dances or whatever to pick up girls. And while I was always up for that when the opportunity arose, I was primarily there to see the bands. The shiny guitars. The curly leads. The red lights that glow on the amps. The Cuban heeled boots. The volume. The riffs. I saw the Beatles when they played the Hull ABC Theatre. I don’t remember much about it. But I saw them. I saw the Rolling Stones in – what must have been around 1964, at the Bridlington Spa. With Brian Jones. There must have been about fifty people in the audience. At Hull Beverley Road Baths they used to put flooring over the pool and put bands on there, I saw the Animals and Manfred Mann with the floor juddering precariously all the time. I hitchhiked down to London to see bands on a fairly regular basis. Saw the Who three times. Went to Leeds to see the Beach-Boys play the Odeon on the Headrow, missed the last train home, and spent the night just walking around the city. But my own real involvement began when I started writing for what was called the ‘Underground’ Press, ‘IT (International Times)’, ‘Styng’ and others. I interviewed Genesis P Orridge of Throbbing Gristle – badly, around that time. But I got better. I’ve always been semi-autonomous. There have been regular magazines I’ve written for – I’ve been a contributor to ‘Hot Press’ for over twenty years, and ‘Rock ‘n’ Reel’ too, but I’ve never been exclusively tied to one in particular. This means that they ring me up and say do I want to interview this band, and more-often-than-not I’ll do it. They know the areas I specialise in. ‘Hot Press’ arranged the Kraftwerk and Can interviews after I’d first done Cabaret Voltaire and other electro-bands in Sheffield. But it also means that I go out and do the pieces I want to do, then market them. So in that way, it’s a personal thing. I’ve never gone into an interview with the intention of mocking or ridiculing. I’ve always taken the attitude that these are creative people doing interesting things. And I’ve seldom been disappointed.’

For the Kinks interview you speak to Dave Davies, not Ray Davies. ‘Yes. And it’s weird. What you’re dealing with, in an interview, is the totality of people’s lives. And I’ve got something like 5,000-6,000 words to explain it. Any one of these people deserves a full book. Many of them have full books written about them. So Ray – yes, obviously. He’s been analysed, his work, his songs, his role in British Rock. But Dave has an equally intriguing story to tell. He was there throughout, a provocative presence at the centre of some of Twentieth Century music’s most seismic decades. And think – Don and Phil Everly. Liam and Noel Gallagher. Sibling love, and sibling rivalry is part of Rock history. And the strange combination of hurt, affection, pain and jealousy that comes across during that interview is very affecting.’

Favourite interviews? ‘For this book David Kerekes, of Headpress – who was astute and perceptive enough to first suggest doing it, asked to see a list of all the interviews I’d done, and from that we selected the contents for the book. There was some trading. He suggested putting the Fall piece in. That’s fine. I rather wanted to put the Moloko piece in, because that also ties in with a continuity angle, I’d already interviewed Mark Brydon in his earlier band – Chakk, and some kind of two-way synthesis of the pieces would have been nice. But Moloko went a bit quiet around that time so it got shelved. There are masses of other things that could have gone in – Deep Purple, Shamen, Erasure, Saint Etienne, ABC, Throwing Muses, Chumbawamba. But the Cabaret Voltaire piece in the book is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. For lots of reasons I love the Grace Slick piece. It was incredible for me to finally get to interview her. But some of my favourite pieces are not necessarily the most obvious ones. Everyone says – yeah, the William Burroughs interview must have been great (not in the current book!). And it was. But I have an equal affection for things I did with now-neglected bands like Clock DVA, who were incredible... I mean, this book starts out with the 1960’s, but it’s not about the sixties. Probably my best time, as an interactive participant was the Eighties electro-industrial scene. That was an amazing time. But it goes on through the Stone Roses and Skunk Anansie. Until last year I saw Oasis, Prodigy, Sneaker Pimps, the Chemical Brothers. And the spirit is the same. At any given time 99% of what’s happening is shit. But it’s that remaining percentage that validates it.’

Where next? ‘Where it all goes from here is anyone’s guess. The next book might be a sequel to this one – called something like ‘I Was Charles Hawtrey’s Movie Body-Double’. Or it might be a Science Fantasy epic novel. Whatever – this book is like a definite punctuation. I’m obviously going to continue doing music journalism. But I’m also going in other directions too. Throughout the years I was doing all those interviews, hanging around soundchecks, watching gigs, doing clubs and festivals, I was also writing fiction and prose things for other areas. At the moment – now, I’m trying to concentrate on doing more fiction. Catching up on that. And that is happening. And that will continue happening. But Martin Amis was interviewed not too long ago about his vision of his own relevance, and he came up with something about ‘if my writing is still read and valued in a hundred years (or was it fifty?), then my work will be validated’. And I think it was Nick Hornby who said that being valued by posterity is less important than reaching a wide and responsive audience in the here and now. What I’ve got is this stupid vision of perhaps in ten or fifteen years time some messed-up kid might come across something that I’ve written stashed away in the chaos of some second-hand bookshop, and – not knowing a damn about the name, he’ll be mildly interested enough to buy it – 20p or 10 Euros or whatever it is then, and he’ll read it and think ‘that was quite good’. I like that idea. I’d be happy with that... perhaps it’ll happen with this book?’

‘A nervy subtlety. A sound like biting steel nails. The shock of the newer. Mal takes a bassline for a walk, a low-rider in a contraflow of rhythms with a low low drag factor. He’s leaving after-images of nervous shock and mind-games of terminal disorder hanging in the air, doing wheelies over your braincell tissue. Ideas sometimes disguised as sound, sometimes as a geometry of moving pictures. Watch the sounds. Listen to the pictures. Mal’s face is made up of vertical, planes and angles, sparse and economical. Richard’s is made up of curves, flourishes, and flowing lines. Richard chain-smokes and watches the wrap-around screens. Extracts from Japanese TV. Aerial shots of the Toyota / Xerox buildings. The screens overlap, overlay. A Harrison Marks nude housewife comes down the stairs... comes down the stairs... comes down the stairs, trapped in trick-frame repetition. A Blue Thunder whirlybird slides out behind skyscrapers into the sun. Over and over. Over and over. Cabaret Voltaire is a multipack of projects. Better. By lack of design...’ (excerpt from the chapter interviewing Cabaret Voltaire)

BY TRISTAN TROTSKY

Published in:-
‘THE SUPPLEMENT no.28’ UK – May 2006

‘EIGHT MILES HIGHER’ WEBSITE

BANNED, BLOCKED, CENSORED…!!!

SF-Poet Steve Sneyd reports that free access to the poem-section of www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com has been blocked by

Kirklees Library Net due to its alleged ‘offensive language’ content.

This accusation refers to the poem “They Fuck You Up, Your Mum” – the title of which, bizarrely, appears unscathed on the mini-index clearly visible on the homepage. In a further absurd contradiction, the title – of course, is lifted from Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”, and Larkin’s original poem from which the quote is taken remains freely available throughout the Library system in multiple formats.

In what is already shaping up to constitute for the 21st Century what the “Lady Chatterley” trial, the “Skoolkids Oz”, “Last Exit To Brooklyn” and the Sex Pistols “Never Mind The Bollocks” was for time’s past, the debate remains ongoing... 

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY

(A Novel of 124,000 words)

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

3,000

WORLD-WIDE

PUBLICATIONS

LATER, AND NOW

THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH NOVEL

- COMING TO THIS WEBSITE SHORTLY

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

Rebels at the End of Time. Insurrectionists of Earth’s Final Days. But are they the unwitting agents of the coming chaos - or the force that will provide ultimate salvation? They must journey to the lost Lunar City Of The Dead to discover the truth... about themselves, and about their doomed ‘Cluster’ of worlds...

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a vividly detailed richly imagined Science Fantasy in the tradition of Michael Moorcock’s Elric sagas, Robert Silverberg’s epic ‘Majipoor Chronicles’, and Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ novels

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a novel of the third millennium. Yet it is also one that makes real the mythopoeic dreams of Science Fiction’s lost worlds.

The novel stands alone as a single volume, complete in itself: but also forms the first third of a trilogy of self-contained but interconnected novels.

When, as an adolescent, I first began reading Science Fiction, I was seduced by rich poetic imaginings set in a Solar System that the advancing blade of science and the technological magic of long-range space-probes has laid to waste. The beauty of Mars as envisaged by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanley G Weinbaum, and Leigh Brackett - an ancient world of dead sea bottoms, planet-wide canals and fantastic cities, has receded further into impossibility. Just as the jewelled jungles, volcanic flame-belts and bizarre civilisations of Venus have been inexorably extinguished by the same process. Even asteroids and the tiny Martian moons once harboured a surrealist phantasmagoria of fictional life-forms...

As JURASSIC PARK resurrected dinosaurs, scientific potential now makes it possible to recreate the Solar System’s lost worlds...

With BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS I have written to the expectations of the third millennium...

The framework of The Cluster, its Last Empire, and its history, is internally consistent. It is grounded in science-based speculation and not fantasy (while drawing on the symbolism that gives fantasy its psychological lure). But the concept of The Cluster validates an unobtrusive sampling of the Science Fiction image-banks by setting various stages of the novels on worlds as mysteriously beautiful, as magical, and from the same continuity as those that seduced my adolescence.

Hence this first novel reaches its conclusion on the kind of Lunar surface that H.G. Wells’ protagonists of ‘THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON’ would not find unfamiliar. The second novel uses the asteroid Ceres and a Mars reverted by future Terraforming to the conditions imagined for it by Nineteenth Century Astronomers like Percival Lowell, as its location. The third novel visits Venus before returning to Earth for the final confrontation.

...excerpts from ‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ have already appeared as works-in-progress and short stories in various magazines, while related short stories drawn from the same continuum continue to appear...

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY (Précis)

...with the aid of ARTANIS VAS KRATZ, GRENAMAN TAAD realises the significance of his, and ANSOR A-HYLCA’s journey through the TIME MARSHES. That significance lies not in their fragmentary and confusing conversations with the ‘Waterlords’, but in the things they saw and experienced during their journey. All of which are ‘clues’.
...ANSOR A-HYLCA is being held in the NAWS TENRAB Hold, where WAR CHAO finds himself increasingly repelled by the methods used by the ELECTOR OF MARS to extend CHLOREL ET-SNAAR’s life.
...DYESPAAR is using NAWS TENRAB’s experiments to infiltrate ‘FORTUNATES’ into BAAL-SHADAAM in preparation for a coup.
...meanwhile, MAREEH is contacted by TENGIZ MKHEDRIONI, former leader or her insurrectionist group - and former lover. Deprived of the signature drug imprisoning her in the corrupt imperial city of ASHIRI her memory returns, but such deprivation will also kill her.
...far from being the important revolutionary figure he has intimated himself to be ANSOR A-HYLCA was deliberately seduced and recruited - on MKHEDRIONI’s specific instructions, with the single objective of using his family connections to bring about the assassination of A-HYLCA’s father, who supplies narcotics for the routine interrogation, torture and control practised by the SPIRIT DOMAIN.
...rather than face death through drug-deprivation MAREEH absorbs through TERMINAL CONTACT into the ASHIRIAN OMPHALOS, where she is able to influence WAR CHAO through the COMMUNICATION GLOBE to release A-HYLCA (and GRENAMAN TAAD who is also, by now, NAWS TENRAB’s prisoner) in an attempt to destroy the ELECTOR OF MARS’ project.
...released from his duties in BAAL-SHADAAM by the destruction of his rival (NAWS TENRAB), ARTANIS VAS KRATZ carries ANSOR A-HYLCA and GRENAMAN TAAD to Luna, where - using the ‘clues’ from the TIME MARSHES, and DYESPAAR as ‘Trancer’, they discover the truth about themselves, and intimations of the imminent FINAL CHAOS.
...GRENAMAN TAAD decides at last to join ANSOR A-HYLCA in the continuing insurrection against the LAST EMPIRE as the AGE OF COMING DARKNESS begins...

‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ is a novel for the third millennium. Yet it is also one that makes real the mythopoeic dreams of Science Fiction’s Lost Worlds.

EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR

“EUROSHIMΑ MON AMOUR”

by 

ANDREW DARLINGTON

‘POEMS FROM THE INNER MIND TO THE OUTER LIMITS’

“... poetry from a twisted mind ...” (‘NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS’)

“ ... an incisive direct style that owes more to a Stanley Knife than to a pen ...” (‘SEPIA’)

“... step inside and sample the delights of a new dimension in entertainment ...” (‘KNAVE’)

“... one of the brightest underground UK Bardic stars ...” (‘GLOBAL TAPESTRY’)

32 poems brought together for the first time - including “Beautiful Pagan”, “Beyond The Contraverse Intersection”, “Mars Is A District Of Sheffield”, “M. Charles Baudelaire’s Quantum Singularity”, “The Wave-Particle Paradox”, and “Hannibal Deathridge: His Journeys In Strange Subterranean Lands, To The Pendant World & Beyond”. ‘EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR’ is a truly extraordinary work by a visionary poet with the ability to see two worlds at once - today’s turbulent existence in the cities of his native Yorkshire, and worlds of soaring wonders beyond the future seen in dark explorations of jewelled catastrophes. Flavoured by a fascination for mix ‘n’ match culture, here is poetry that achieves (to quote K.V. Bailey’s foreword) ‘immaculate structuring ... accomplished musicality’ and above all, the energy and sense of wonder that brings back startling revelations from the intersection of two planes of outstanding vision (STEVE SNEYD)

Available NOW from HILLTOP PRESS 

4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, W. Yorks HD5 8PB, ENGLAND

ISBN 0-905262-27-1 £3.99 / $8.00

Coming Shortly from the same author

‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ a dark Far-Future Science Fantasy novel of visionary scope, in the tradition of Jack Vance’s ‘DYING EARTH’, Leigh Brackett’s Martian fantasies, Robert Silverberg’s ‘MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES’, and Moorcock’s ELRIC sagas

Still Available from the same author

‘I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S BASTARD LOVE-CHILD’ anthology of 20 years of Music journalism, featuring interviews with The Kinks, The Byrds, Fleetwood Mac, Kraftwerk, Grace Slick, Stone Roses, Can, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie, Led Zeppelin and many others

“I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S

BASTARD LOVE-CHILD 

... & other stories of Rock ‘n’ Roll excess”

a Book by 

ANDREW DARLINGTON

Frank Zappa said ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’

This is the sound of dancing architecture. Is it autobiography ?

Is it twenty years of Music Interviews ? NAW - it’s both - and more !!!!

• The art of TRAINSPOTTING with LEFTFIELD
• NODDY HOLDER’s contribution to the

   legend of JOE MEEK - ‘The Telstar Man’
• KINK DAVE DAVIES divulges the full shocking truth behind ‘David Watts’
• GENE CLARK gigs in a Wakefield Working Man’s Club, and explains
   how he wrote THE BYRDS psychedelic classic “Eight Miles High”
• FLEETWOOD MAC’s founder PETER GREEN is a ‘Man Of The World’,
   just that for two decades that world happened to be Saturn
• COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH play ‘Electric Music
   For The Mind & The Body’ - live in Leeds
• GRACE SLICK - JEFFERSON AIRPLANE / STARSHIP’s ‘Daphne Dildo’
   Feeds Your Head with ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’
• Franz Schubert comes in to say hello to KRAFTWERK’s Machine Spirit
• How CAN’s HOLGER CZUKAY blew up a Nazi Arms Dump
• FALL’s MARK E SMITH on the secrets of
   GENE VINCENT’s role in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ ... plus
• SIOUXSIE SIOUX, STONE ROSES, IAN HUNTER, and more
   AND - How ROBERT PLANT of LED ZEPPELIN met and duets with Elvis.
   How I shake Robert Plant’s hand. The hand that shook hands with Elvis.
   So how I - by proxy, shake hands with my REAL father ....

‘I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S BASTARD LOVE-CHILD’

by ANDREW DARLINGTON

(from HEADPRESS / CRITICAL VISION

ISBN 1-900486-17-2 - £13.99 / $19.95)

Still Available from the same author

“EUROSHIMΑ MON AMOUR”

‘POEMS FROM THE INNER MIND TO THE OUTER LIMITS’ 

from HILLTOP PRESS 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield,

W. Yorks HD5 8PB ISBN 0-905262-27-1 £3.99 / $8.00

And Coming Shortly from the same author

‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ 

a dark Far-Future Science Fantasy novel of visionary scope, in

the tradition of  Jack Vance’s ‘DYING EARTH’, Leigh Brackett’s

Martian fantasies, Robert Silverberg’s ‘MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES’,

and Michael Moorcock’s ELRIC sagas

GREETINGS.... recently reported developments in Cloning Technology encourage me to believe that perhaps soon I’ll be able to split off duplicate selves, & do collectively all the things I never find time to do individually. With multiples of myself one can read all the books I want to read, another listen to all the music, a third & fourth can do deep introspective dialogue with me to explain myself to myself, one can create fantastic dream-igniting poems & outrageously subversive stories in a cork-lined room while another types them out  mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Of course the scope for exploring bizarre permutations of auto-eroticism might prove a little time-consuming, & some of me will probably decide to leave & follow-up those troublingly incomplete romantic/sexual relationships scattered like aching question marks through our collective life ... & that throws up further alternative life-style possibilities - I can simultaneously become a decadent artist fusing weirdly outrageous acid-Miro with spaced-out Beardsley, I can publish furtive art-insurrectionist magazines, be an eco-anarchist, a squalid junkie rent-boy (purely as fictional research material), a sax-playing Coltrane Jazz-Bohemian redefining the aural limits of electro-sonic expression, & a beach-bum in Crete stoned on Raki and Aegean sunsets mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
But then ... at least ONE of me can devote time exclusively to this site, adding stuff....