Release me...

Bob's asked me to post up a press release for the new album before he sends it off to the fourth estate. Hopefully, it will come in handy when you're weighing up the pros and cons of the various album concepts I'm hoping to put up here for your scrutiny later this week, all being well. OK, over to Bob...

This may well turn out to be the sort of urban myth future generations will cackle over as they warm their hands over the campfire and wait for the nuclear winter to thaw out, but I read somewhere that the first child who will go on to live to 1,000 has already been born...

Assuming we can make it beyond the apocalypse threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran, were such a fundamental schism in the genetic durability of the species to be realised in the form of the 1,000 year old man, it would represent a triumph of sorts for the prevailing rationalist/capitalist hegemony. After all, such enduring genes won't come cheap, one supposes. And who but the godless could possibly feel so emboldened as to place such a miracle down in the midst of the rest of us?; the teeming mass of three-score years and tenners. And what would such a world be like for those on the other side of the golden dawn? That's the kind of territory I've tried to inhabit in this new set of songs. I suppose I've set myself the brief of creating the soundtrack to a reinterpretation of 'Brave New World' as realised by Dennis Potter; either that or some bizarre kind of tea dance/trip hop fusion. Potter saw the popular songform of the thirties he grew up listening to as secular psalms. I suppose that's what I've been striving for here - little prayers offered up to the sky, barely audible above the din of the urban sprawl.

"You've made me such a beautiful monster" sings a child of the future to the stem cells from which he was created. "We chose your eyes from a million pairs of eyes - now I wish that you could see me". The question I suppose we want to know is this: "is that *really* all we are?" Is it just me, or does it not feel counter-intuitive to think of oneself as little more than a bundle of genetic codes and instructions. There is, surely, more to us than that, isn't there? So our guts tell us, in any case. But it's precisely those intuitions - gut feelings, hunches, intimations of the transcendent - that are so beloved of the artist and so despised by rationalists such as Richard Dawkins. We're asked not to believe something that seems so self-evident as we experience those occasional moments of elevation in life. What makes us feel most human, it seems, we are expected to disdain, deride or ultimately, as the logic of our mutability should dictate, will one day in any case be forcibly removed. I'm not a conventionally religious person, but I can see how people who are should feel so irked by the lack of humility evident in Dawkins' position. There is a need for greater humility all round, it seems to me; especially when our experiments with the stuff we're made of appear on the cusp either of redefining the nature of existence for future generations, and our fundamentalist doctrines of destroying that future altogether.

So, it's an age-old question for such a brave new world: do we have what might be called a soul? "I start to care about their souls; where they go when the flesh implodes?" sings the 1,000 year-old man himself in the song of the same name. Bored by centuries of whoring, he starts to lose the will to live himself as, one by one, his ephemeral human lovers slip off their mortal coils. It's a tender love song to those mayfly mammals - lounge lizard Martin Amis. "How long would be enough, for all our monkey stuff?" he asks.

Beautiful monsters, mutable Millennial monkeys preening themselves in a glamorous hell - is that all we are? It's an album of irreconcilable contradictions, just like the times, really; the ridiculous jauntiness of the vaudevillian self-harmer in 'The loving blade' - Vivian Stanshall sings Nine Inch Nails, perhaps? Or the cosmic traveller who's journeyed light years across space and time just to end up on this crummy planet Earth, "all eleven of [his] senses deranged" and only staying long enough to "live and die and try to get along". And what about the children at the other end of the spectrum from our long-lived descendants? The little lives that barely bloom before they're gone? The last song, 'Star Baby', is a lullaby for them - and the rest of us too, I suppose.

I don't for one second pretend to have the answers - just a lot of song-shaped questions. Hope you like 'em...

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob