Picos Gemeos

As usual, the first few songs are bands I saw at Rockaway Beach in Bognor, the festival that basically carries on New Year's celebrations for a few more days.

The Pill - Woman Driver. Often I find that bands that play Rockaway are 6Music-famous by the end of the year, Self Esteem, Fat Dog, Fontaines DC. Ditto this band who've been on permanent play on the indier of the 6M shows. This song is a lot of sarcastic fun.

Arxx - Crying In The Car Wash. Fun fact, Brighton's Arxx wrote the songs for the BBC's Riot Women. This one is electro clashing with indie with a bit of a Robyn vibe.

Fontaines DC - It's Amazing To Be Young. In which Grian sings. Not necessarily successfully but let's give points for effort. I like the jangletastic semi-shoegaze of the backing. Can't really empathise with the sentiment, obvs, although "sometimes I wake up and it's dark" rings some bells.



Wet Leg - Catch These Fists. They're back! with a second album! We went to the launch event where we didn't get to meet the band (and anyway, we already met Josh (keyboards, guitar) outside Purezza in Brighton back in 2021) but did meet the Goblin on the album cover. Anyway, Catch These Fists is Rhian being a fighter not a lover as some loser tries to chat her up, with a bit of Franz Ferdinand's Do You Want To thrown in.

Pulp - Spike Island. They're back! It seemed obvious after their triumphant return to live gigs in '24 that they'd want a bit more Arabacus Pulpy action. I had thought they'd squeezed everything they could out of pop, but i surprised myself by humming this a lot back in April. I was wrestling with the coat-hanger, can you guess who won? is classique Jarv.

Chuck D - New Gens. He's back! Damn, he's weird. I loved this track, which I assumed was about Gen X loving the Zs. Makes a fucking change for an elder statesman to celebrate the younger generation. Rest in place and cowabunga.

D Meletis - Niamos. I got bored during the second series of Andor, but I liked the wedding episode which was basically the characters dancing to this song for 50 mins. We both liked it so much that we had it at our wedding (party), but not for 50 minutes straight.



Erika Vikman - Ich Komme. Erika was robbed. This saucy seaside postcard of a song should've beaten that Austrian simp.

Sissal - Hallucination. The second best sing at Euroviz.

Pulp - Got To Have Love. As above but more electro-gospely.

The Pill - Posh. More from the Isle of Wight's second best band. Proving that youngsters aren't all sitting at home drinking kombucha and talking about #fitnessgoals. "Red wine, red lips, sore tummy and a bag of chips. I've lost my drink!"

Wet Leg - CPR. Is it love or suicide? Rhian falls in love. I worry if she falls out of love there's going to be a car crash of a break up album.

Suede - Disintegrate. I heard this song on 6Music and was like, who is this? Then Brett's whine came in. Given that I spent much of the early '90s with a dislike of Suede that was only mollified when Oasis came on the scene, I was surprised that i liked it - probably because it's sounds like early '80s Cure.



CMAT - Take A Sexy Picture Of Me. We've had country, alt-country, folk-country, and now Welsh-country. This was pretty much Ciara's year and it's good that popstars can still come up through the OG gig economy rather than the Simon Cowell route.

Bater Dury - Schadenfruede. Like the Suede song, I heard this on the radio and was all kindsa excited until I Baxter's nasal drone kicked in, but i ended up really liking it, despite the mispronunciation of schadenfreude. After all, It's my favourite emotion, I know how to pronounce it.



Wig Wam - Do You Wanna Taste It? I wrote last year that once upon a time I got to know music from adverts, now it's theme tunes frm TV programmes. This was the theme tune from S1 of Peacemaker, my fave TV show of the year. I don't usually like '80s themed hair metal but combined with the awkward dancing form the cast, it was a grower.

Foxy Shazam - Oh Lord. I didn't think the theme tune to S2 could be better but I ended up with a permanent earworm. Keep on. Keeping on!

Coach Party - Disco Dream. Pretty much like The Pill: loud guitars, shouty vocals, like being 21 again. Another from the Isle of Wight - Wet Leg has started a Solent revolution! The music. The dancefloor. The lights.

Humour - Plagiarist. Like the 2000s never happened, I like the way it goes from 1991 style industrial hardcore to indie-melodic grunge.

Nation of Language - The Wall and I. picosgemeos and I saw these in November and given that I only knew one song (2017's Fractured Mind), I really loved them. They came off somewhere between The Postal Service and OMD, but unlike '80s electro bands they were active, not static behind synths and were very entertaining with some Napoleon Dynamite-esque boogieing. Also we had seats, which always helps.

Adrien Noelle, Nancy Wang - Sharevari. They also played this, which is a cover of the first techno song by A Number of Names from 1981. I prefer the cover.

Sleaford Mods & Big Special - The Good life. The Sleaford Mods mad-person-on-the-bus ranting broken up by the soulful crooning of Big Special.

Just Mustard - Endless Deathless. Let's finish the year with something that sounds like the Nightblooms why don't we?

The Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7rjWB3CLBP9280WDhH159b?si=ZPUEp87XS6Gvr1ACjGvJnw

‘It’s wet,’ a young woman warned my lover and I just as we reached the tube train’s only free seat. ‘Pass it along if I leave before you.’

At the next stop, a grandmother with her 4-year-old grandchild went for the soggy seat. I stopped them. She apologised profusely in Mandarin while the child translated my warning.

‘I nearly brought sticky notes,’ I told my lover while I rummaged through my backpack for paper. He fished a black marker pen out of his, a torn journal page and voilà: someone’s trousers were saved.

Mom coughs in the guesthouse’s living room, our cleaning lady Jéssica moves through mom's bedroom, and the maritacas make their usual racket in the garden.

I'll venture out later with Merlin – Cornell University’s bird app – to capture their songs and log them in. Yesterday, the app recorded a bird I'd never heard before—just the one. I'd been hearing its song from the garden, just outside my office window, plus the wood tapping of a woodpecker; a toucan too. Eventually I stepped outside but never spotted the mysterious bird; my only proof of its passage was its song on the app. 

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June 10th: Do you revise and add more plot if you feel your story is too short?

Not at all. I add or subtract as I see fit, if it feels like there's more to be told. Usually, I have an excess of material and it's more a question of cutting back and polishing until I have the final piece.

June 11th: Is it okay to use a comma before a dependent clause? Or anywhere else?

I had to look this up. You apparently shouldn't really use it before a dependent clause if the clause appears at the end of the sentence. If the sentence starts with the dependent clause, then you can use the comma after it. But, for me personally, don't worry about these rules. Do whatever you want. If your piece has a strong mood and interesting use of language, you'll have me hooked.

June 12th: Which social media channels do you use as a writer? Which gives you the best engagement?

I go back and forth on this one. I currently update friends on Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, Substack, Livejournal and Instagram. Mastodon tends to get the most engagement (because of the writing-related hashtags). Livejournal gets sometimes the deepest conversations on writing, and Facebook the strongest cheers (I only have 60 connections, but they are all close friends).

7. What do you do first when you start a new writing project?

I pour everything down on paper, as much as possible, without worrying about coherence, point of view, syntax. Just write and write, getting past the "internal editor", until I have a good solid chunk of material down. Once I'm done, I let it sit for a bit then treat it as a rough outline.

I used to hate revising but it's now my best friend. From that initial Big Bang, many galaxies are born and then die.

This method was very much inspired by Wendy Erskine’s interview with Hattie Crisell for the “In Writing” podcast.

4. How do you handle highly intimate scenes?

It varies from story to story. My two current works in progress are horror novels which contain intimate scenes. Sometimes they are there to help the reader connect with characters and care for them, sometimes they are there to maximise horror. I try to avoid explicit content, unless there's a point to it.

I'd also add that they don't come easy to me, and I don't naturally gravitate towards them. I prefer things implied.

2. Do you have any regrets as a writer, or do you never look back?

Never look back: I don't believe in free will and don't think I could have reached this point in my life without all the successes and failures that came before, or done anything different that would have made me a better writer. It is what it is, and I'm glad of what I've learned and what I can do today with my skills.

Writing nowadays involves a lot of compassion for myself and detachment from outcomes.

1. LJ appeared in April 1999, the year when I… had just started my first serious long term relationship, with Kevin, and was approaching the end of my time in Montréal. That year, I completed my BA in History and English Lit at Concordia University and started an intensive french course in McGill. Little did I know that just round the corner was a friend I'd make who'd introduce me to LJ.

2. As a child, I wanted to become a… private detective. I fell in love with Agatha Christie when I was 8 and devoured all her books, plus any adjacent authors. If there was a crime and a mystery, I was hooked. I even started investigating "crimes" in the building I lived in São Paulo, roping in friends as my assistants. Then I started writing crime fiction; my detective's name was Mr Clark and there was usually a very high body count behind him by the time he figured out who was the murderer.

3. My favorite school subject was… Portuguese. I loved books, lived in the school's library, and couldn't be happier whenever the teacher gave us a creative writing exercise. 

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I forgot to mention LJ in my last post, but it's worth bringing it up as well.

I now have only 5 active friends here! It's such a change from the earlier years, when I had over 300 active friends. I've been reading my LJ chronologically (currently in 2009) and we all posted so often back then, and there were so many comments...

I've been thinking: with the advent of A.I., if there was some way for Livejournal to incorporate it and give us a functionality that translated posts and comments, maybe that would open a new world for us? We could start connecting with the other side of LJ, and vice versa?

That's my tip for you, LJ Development Team!