Wider Reading | The time I met Andy and Angela McCoy outside an iLiKETRAiNS show

Last night, I went to see iLiKETRAiNS (or I Like Trains as they now profess to be called) at the 100 Club – this may or may not, incidentally, be a clue about who’s going to be behind this week’s mixtape. Anyway, stepping outside onto Oxford Street for a quick cigarette in between the two dreadful support acts, the following occurred:

Man dressed as gauntly ribbony rock‘n’roll pirate approaches, a bevy of astonishingly drunk and frankly dirty-looking hanger-ons in tow.

Man – Thaddaspliff?

Me – I’m sorry?

Man – Thadda. Spliff?

Me – No. This is Oxford Street. That would be imprudent.

Man – Who’s playing in there?

Matt Cooper from Spring Offensive – iLiKETRAiNS (Matt prefers the old spelling)

Man grunts.

Me (to man) – I like your gold tooth.

Woman unceremoniously pushes man out of the way.

Woman – It’s Andy fucken McCoy dude, show some fucken respect.

Me – Who?

Woman – Andy fucken McCoy.

She grabs my cigarette.

Me – I don’t know who that is.

Matt Cooper from Spring Offensive – Is he famous?

She returns my cigarette and starts to walk off. She turns around.

Woman – See y’all later man, I love you.

Beat.

Woman – What am I saying, I don’t love you, I don’t even fucken know you.

So look, it turns out Andy McCoy (Matt and I initially thought she’d said Jason McCoy – himself an established Canadian c&w singer-songwriter it turns out – but Matt’s girlfriend Lianne put us right. That such a mistake was even possible to make, is a testament to how fucking drunk these fifty-somethings actually were) it turns out Andy McCoy is a pretty interesting dude. Perhaps even deserving of the ‘fucken respect’ that was asked of unsuspecting me.

Lead guitarist and principal songwriter with Hanoi Rocks, the most successful Finnish band of the 1980s and godfathers of hair metal (Duff McKagan and Slash used to go to their shows. They used to party with Mötley Crüe until Vince Neil killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle in a drunken car crash. Don't get in a car with Vince Neil) Andy McCoy has written songs with Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople, played guitar on a couple Iggy tours and has inspired the admiration of such esteemed mediocres as the Manics, the Foos, Alice in Chains and Joe Elliot of Def Leppard, who went as far as to state the following:

The only band – and I’m not saying it because we’re here [Swedish festival] – the only band that did pull it off was Hanoi Rocks. I thought Hanoi Rocks were a good band, and Michael Monroe [Hanoi frontman] was one of the best… I would have shagged him. [Laughs] I like Michael, I think he’s sexy, and I’m not gay. And I think Andy McCoy does the best kind of Keith Richards... so much better than Mötley Crüe or Poison or any of those bands. Hanoi Rocks were real – the rest of the guys, it was all a bit fake for me.

Such is McCoy’s stature in Finland, a statue of him was erected in the main square of a town called Pelkosenniemi. He continues to make music and does a bunch of other stuff, best summarised by what has to be the worst written Wiki page on the entire net:

Besides music, McCoy is an avid painter and he also makes a lot of his own clothes for himself and his wife along with Designing jewelry, scarfs, you name it and he can make something not so good looking look great. Ivo De Lange At Team IQ (www.iq.nl) whom is McCoy’s Creative Consultant saw something very Innovative and special in Andy and his paintings. McCoy had his first Art Exhibition last May 2010 at The Cabel Factory In Helsinki, Finland titled ‘Pure McCoy Hits Canvas’. The Art Exhibition was a great success protected by The Kingdom Of The Netherlands. Team IQ and McCoy plan to have another one in the near future.

Glorious. ‘The Art Exhibition was a great success protected by the Kingdom Of The Netherlands.’ What the bloody hell does that mean? Needless to say, the guy’s paintings are fucking dreadful.

Oh yeah, his wife. Andy’s wife, who I’m almost certain is the nice lady who took my cigarette then loved me then didn’t love me IS JOHNNY THUNDERS’ COUSIN. This would be reason enough to put together an Essay-Soundtrack-Playlist celebrating an extraordinary ten seconds that, in hindsight, I should have definitely followed up by writing off iLiKETRAiNS and painting the town whisky-/vomit-coloured with McCoy’s crew. That most of Hanoi Rocks’ work is actually pretty fun is an even better reason. So here it is.

And God bless you both, Andy and Angela McCoy. Truly I can now say, I love you both too.

SKS

Bees | Music | Blow Job Betty

Nick Cave’s Grinderman side-project has been universally described, alongside The Death of Bunny Munro, as the noises a mad-gifted man makes when he grows old disgracefully. And No Pussy Blues, the former’s best-known track (‘I thought I’d try another tack / I drank a litre of cognac / I threw her down upon her back / But she just laughed, and said she just didn’t want to…I got the no pussy blues’) not to mention the opening paragraphs of the latter’s third chapter (‘beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically-shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls are up for it, big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones’) make it pretty bloody easy to see why.

Actually, Cave is growing old considerably less disgracefully than, I don’t know, Ronnie Wood, with his face like a smoker’s lung and his soggy phallus not even wedged between the thighs of a Kazakhstan-born teenager anymore. Cave is happily married to that lady off-of the front of the Roxy Music best-of. Cave has charming twin boys who play silly games with the Bad Seeds. The middle-aged Cave is, really, only as disgraceful as the sexual content in his work – by which token Craig Raine, Sebastian Faulks and innumerable other joylessly gentile writers can also be considered dirty old men.

Which does a disservice to dirty old men the world over, right? Cave only gets this shit because he has a beautiful moustache.

Anyway. What’s important here is that an important facet of Cave’s latter-day ‘disgracefulness’ is a casual misogyny that manifests, time and time again, in the phraseology he uses to address babes. And at least twice on the first Grinderman record, this means references to his ‘honey bee’. Harmless enough, until the context is thrown into the mix:

…She’s my honey bee and here she comes
Cancer rabies SARS
Hairy beards and hurtling stars
Won’t somebody touch me?
Won’t somebody touch me?
Honey bee lets fly to Mars
Buzzzzz buzzzz buzzzzz…

On second thoughts, maybe this song isn’t about a chick after all. But we’re too far in to worry about that. It being Bee Week, then, and what with my Silkworms column increasingly resembling a weekly celebration of Nick Cave, here be a Honey Bee Let’s Fly To Mars-inspired celebration of borderline-sexist slash reallyreallysexist approached to addressing women in poetry and music. Derek Walcott and his wandering hands would surely approve...

Louis XIV’s Finding Out True Love Is Blind

Pitchfork did such an unsurpassably good job of rinsing the first Louis XIV record (astonishingly, there was a second) penning it in the form of a conversation between singer Jason Hill and his doctor…

-Good morning, Mr. Hill.

-Doctor Bolend, what's going on man! It’s been too long, man.

-Long indeed, Mr. Hill.

-Almost as long as my dick!

-That’s nice, Mr. Hill. Looking at your file, I see it’s been three years since your last check-up. How have you been feeling?

-Better than ever man. I'm so healthy I can drink more than pregnant hookers in heat. I’m so ripped I can stick needles in my arms, then stick needles in my needles’ arms. I’ve fucked so many girls in the last five minutes that I’m gonna be orgasming straight through May. And don’t even get me started about how many girls I’ve fucked in the last five minutes.

…that I’m going to list some of the terms of feminine address in their biggest hit, Finding Out True Love Is Blind, and leave it at that:

‘Chocolate girl’
‘Your little Asian friend’

‘Carrot juice’
‘Your vanilla friend’
‘Miss little smart girl with your glasses and all your books’
‘Brown girl’

Und so weiter.

John Berryman’s Dream Song No. 4

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken paprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

‘You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry’s dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni. –Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

–Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast…The slob beside her     feasts … What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

–Mr Bones: there is.

The entire Mötley Crüe back-catalogue

The following are the lyrics to the Girls, Girls, Girls (1987) track All In The Name Of… I suspect the, turns out, criminally amoral Mötley Crüe could do and did do better than ‘honey bee’ but unfortunately I can’t bring myself to listen to their awful, awful songs:

She’s only fifteen
She’s the reason – the reason that I can't sleep
You say illegal
I say legal’s never been my scene
I try like hell but I'm out of control

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Pretty, pretty so innocent
She says you ain’t seen nothing yet
Brings me a dirty, dirty magazine
There she was for all the world to see
I try like hell but I’m out of control. All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Says to me daddy
Can I have some candy
Wanna be your nasty
Anytime you want
You know you can have me

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll.

The entire Charles Bukowski back-catalogue

Extract from The Most Beautiful Woman In Town from 1983’s The Most Beautiful Woman In Town & Other yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwn:

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men…

Lord Byron’s objectifications

As everybody knows, where literature was concerned, Byron was only in it for the snatch. She who Walks In Beauty, not to mention Lara and his Beautiful Quaker – that shit’s obvious. More interesting is the fact that when he’s talking about Newstead Abbey and The Vision Of Judgement, he’s almost certainly still thinking about the puss.

But all of these pale into insignificance when placed alongside the frankly extraordinary thing that is Too $hort’s Blow Job Betty. As one youtube commenter put it, ‘I love this dude. He’s the reason white women over 30 hate rap.’ Bukowski, you, sir, are a pussy compared to this guy (actually, LyricsFreak seems to suggest, shockingly, that the below is the work of five different hands…)

…Too $hort baby, I'm so hard
Pimpin' these hoes on the boulevard
But I'm not here to tell ya bout me
I got a little story bout a nasty freak
She's the kind of girl you think about in bed
Blowjob Betty givin' real good head
Bust a left nut, right nut in her jaw
Sperm on her cheeks is all ya saw
She could blow more head than a whale blows water
Blowjob Betty make your dick get harder
She's a one of a kind, a hell of a girl
A trip and a half around the world
Catch her gettin' busy, bitch wouldn't stop
She's the kind of girl that'll make your toes pop
Every time I used to see her, I would know what's up
Blowjob Betty better blow me up
I remember the day when I first met her
Bitch kinda loose so I knew I'd get her
Walked up to her said
"my name is $hort, just what
you've been lookin' for"
Pimp is my game, I do it the best
Hoe fuck with me, she don't get no rest
Well after that, I G'ed the freak
I used to stop by and fuck about twice a week
And from the very first time I went to her house
Walked in the door and stuck my dick in her mouth
$hort Dog'll get bitches anytime I wanna
Got a big dick and lay it right on her tonsils
Only stick it in about half way back
Cause if I put it all in, it bust straight through her neck…

The likes of the above examples, ladies and gentleman of the jury, testify to the fact that Colony Collapse Disorder constitutes the great ecological challenge of our time. A world without the honey bee would be a world without misogyny. To work, then!

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor