Hey kids! A song from album number two has leaked. NOW. It is called I Am Not Dead (Yeah!). Maybe you have seen us do it live. The version that has leaked is not the final version. The final version will have a very special guest singing the chorus. Maybe you can guess who. maybe not.
That’s a nice image isn’t it? Me and BJ in Galway a few months back. The dog lived on that beach, guarding something or the other. It barked at us.
ANYWAY. My manager rang wanting working album titles for some conference or other. Being an unimaginative sort, I have been referring to it as “LP2″, but at Evil Dr Hitchman’s insistence, I drew up the following list with a little help from my friends. Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments. I thank you.
WORKING TITLES FOR AKIRA THE DON’S SECOND ALBUM:
The Irrepressible Akira The Don
The Hermit Crawls From His Cave And Proclaims “Injustice”!
Don Stop Me Now (I’m Having Such A Good Time)
Songs Of Experience
Top Trumps
Madam, I’m Adam
Pooh Sticks
Akira The Don’s Big Knob
TITS!
Beware Of Feeling Smug
Loss Of Faith & Poverty
The Glory Of A Face Is Its Beard
It’s Still About One
Dog Trough
Akira The Don’s Blackcurrent Preserve
The Bollock Factory
So, I went to Hastings yesterday, to do my first day of record for LP2 with Dr Stephen Hague. We recorded vocals for a song called I Am Not Dead (Yeah!), that a few of you might have caught live at the last few gigs.
Dr Hague lives in a gigantic white house up a hill overlooking the ocean with his fine woman, some cats, and a relatively well behaved greyhound. You can see France from his studio window on clear days. That is how to live! You know what can see out of my window right now? An old man stealing oranges from the Turkish shop over the road that has the rudest female staff I have ever encountered. Actually, it’s not so bad. I realised the other day I spend most of my days in a converted attic. Which is something I really wanted to do when I was about six.
Careful what you wish for, children…
Oh, if you get a sec, vote for my boy Marv The Marsh’s new single over at MTV Bass.
Word, I hate moving houses!
I like unpacking after though. Arranging stuff. I like building shelves. I’m on that right now. Well, right now I’m on break. You dig me!
I got a can of Rio, and that is nice. That shit is still bigger than the other cans - 13.6% Extra Free est. as long as I can remember. When I was like, 8, we’d drive to Safeways in Upper Bangor to do the monthly shop, and if I was lucky I’d get me one of those as a treat.
Who was at that Bizzle show? Damn, that shit banged hard! Marv and Jack’s set was boss, cot DAMN those boys have come on since the Purple Turtle. They did Boom at the end and that Big Dog Westwood was jiving up onstage. Ghetto sprays hard, credit where credit is due. It’s always good to see Skinny, but I could have done with more stuff from his album, that shit was classic. I took Narstie and Littles down, and it was ill to see Narstie bring the house down without even getting onstage. That Brian Harvey-looking cat from N Dubs doing his and Solo’s rhymes was kind of weird.
Me, I never touched that stage and I blew the roof of THREE TIMES, fam. Babylon was straight moshpit, and B had the kids jogging on the spot like Running Man for Police, shit was CRAZY!
So, LP2 is pretty much written - straight ANTHEMS baby - and I’m in pre-production with the legend Stephen Hague. Get to know. That shit won’t be out till second quarter I figure, the way this beast of an industry moves, so what I’m gonna do, oh my good good peoples, is hit you off with, like, a pre-album album/mixtape thing for Xmas. A CD full of shit I can’t clear for mainstream commercial use (samples are a bigger headache by the day) - stuff that missed the last album for reasons of illegality and tone, and stuff I’ve been writing since the last album that just doesn’t fit the vision of the next one. Tear jerkers, bangers, screamers, murderers… Good shit. The record’s gonna be called Thieving - look out for a track with the same name imminently. It goes off to the printers next week, and we’ll start taking pre-orders as soon as the art’s done.
HO HO HO!
Oh, I nearly forgot - I just confirmed a Christmas show. Akira The Don & The Women will support my peoples The Crimea at Bush Hall, London on December 18th. It’s an acoustic show, so I’m getting me a drummer and shit. FIRST!
“If our universe functions associatively - which we might expect, if both it and our consciousness are holographic - then our dwelling upon a subject may be the equivalent of an evocation: a calling forth of information both useful and irrelevant.”
Jeff Wells
Hey yo you good good people. I write to you amidst a fug of smoke from my spot on Upper Clapton Road. I am in The Roof - top floor of the building, I look out of my window and I see the top of stoke Newington stretching out to that goshdang Gherkin that I swear is a missile that will one day take off and blow up the motherlovin’ moon.
My mattress rests on the floor, backed up by its broken bed frame. Everything in this house is falling apart. Jeres’ curtain rail came crashing down the other night, so he’s pinned up a translucent black sheet, giving his room a nice gothic air, and I ripped him off and hung my Spider-man bedspread over the window.
I just mixed the demo of a song called 18, which may or may not be the centrepiece of my second album. The first is sill out there, doing its thing - Oh! What A Glorious retirement Fund shows up on two BBC ads yesterday. Before that second album, I’m gonna hit you off with a bridge - the mixtape will contain ten remastered mixtape classics, and ten new songs, culled from the When We Were Young and LP2 sessions. Maybe some more stuff. I’m getting that together next week. There’ll be a brand new double A side single, and three new videos. Zef’s working on some Thanks For All The AIDS T-Shirts.
I saw The Simpsons movie last night. I laughed the whole way through.
My internet is behaving really oddly right now - I can only get on Gmail, Rigint and XXLmag.com for some reason. Social Networking Groups are a no no. If you have anything to say to me, do it here or by the email.
Really though, you should go read Jeff Wells.
PS - The pictures were taken the good Dr Saam Gabbay, who was in Joshua Tree watching that meteor shower. Saam knows how to go about this business called living.
