'Threesomes, Chodes, and F**k Buddies' with Erin K. & Tash

THE BAND of merry singers known as Erin K. & Tash could be likened to a number of different artists, present and past. This ‘review’ could be written to present those juxtapositions in an orderly and informative fashion, yet you will find none of those things in this here summation, dearest reader.

They are performing at the Book Club on Old Street for the pub’s monthly ‘Come Get Felt Up’ gig night. They sing songs about the virtues of orgastic and no-strings-attached sex; they mock small penis’ and play dirge’s for fallen Macbooks and they’ll laugh at your manhood again if you give them the chance. If anything, their sound is experimental—a mix of modern folk and simple, well-harmonized coffee shop instruments with their lyrics maintaining the stream-of-consciousness style any beatnik would enjoy. Its an odd combination coming from such arrestingly beautiful girls, but thats what makes it work.

We are standing outside in a recessed doorway, around the corner from the screams and yelps of smokers loitering outside the club’s entrance. Its raining, as London tends to enjoy itself. Erin and Tash finished their gig some time ago and are visibly buzzing; downright excited, either from the drink or the adrenal-high you get after putting in a good performance for an appreciative/drunk audience. They hold themselves with an air of recherché unimportance, an even rarer trait considering the Miles Davis kind of Cool they have unaffectedly mastered. They laugh easily at each-other and every time they tell a supposedly embarrassing story they laugh even harder. When they speak, they speak frankly, taking the conversation on random, dirty-road tangents — as if they know exactly what it is that proverbially ‘turns you on.’ While suit-clad yuppies fight for limited carriage space on the underground line towards careers that promise health-care and a steady income, these girls are fighting to get off that carriage and onto some Paul Butterfield inspired Mystery Train bound for a world where the words 'economic downturn' and 'credit freeze' are nonexistent and Hendrix is worshipped in cathedrals. Its a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world... except for Erin K. & Tash.

I had never heard of the band before a friend invited me to their gig. Not knowing a thing about them, I turned to the audience, who were undoubtedly more informed of these two sirens than I. 


I asked the neo hippie crowd to write down a single question for me to ask Erin and Tash. The following transcript is their word-for-word response.

- - - -

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS WITH ERIN K. & TASH

- - - -

WCS: “You can answer these questions as honestly or as dishonestly as you want.”

ERIN K: “It’s fine. I’m a very honest person.”

WCS: “Fantastic. The first question is from Anita. She asks, ‘Would you have a threesome with Cooper?’”

ERIN K: “Yes.”

- pause -

ERIN K: “Fuck yeah, actually. Fuck yeah.”

- pause -

WCS: “Brill… Brilliant. Question two: ‘Do you like cheese?’”

ERIN K: “I fucking love cheese.”

I turn to Tash.

TASH: “Yes and yes.”

WCS: “Just to be clear, that is ‘yes’ to a threesome with Cooper and ‘yes’, you like cheese.”

TASH: “Yes to the threesome and of course, I love cheese.”

ERIN K: “She’s Dutch.”

WCS:            “So I hear… James wants to know: ‘Who is the best musician/fuck buddy?’”

ERIN K:      “Within the band?”

I shrug.

ERIN K:            “Well, Tash, obviously.”

I look at Tash and get no response besides a cheeky grin.

WCS:            “Arun asks: ‘Where do you get inspiration for your lyrics?’”

ERIN K:            “From the things in my life. Like this song I wrote called ‘I Just Ate Shit’, it was because I was just served something that tasted like dog shit—smelled like dog shit.

WCS:            “Where was that?”

ERIN K:            “That was at a restaurant on the King’s Road. I can’t give you the name.”

WCS:            “Why not?”

ERIN K:            “Because that would be—“

TASH:            “Over Eight!”

WCS:            “Defamation?”

TASH:            “Libel!”

WCS:            “Its just an opinion.”

ERIN K:            “I can’t! My father’s a lawyer, he told me not to.”

TASH:            “I studied law!”

ERIN K:            “Wha—Oh! She’s a lawyer too! We have a lawyer in our midst’s!”

TASH:            “Yeah I just graduated this year. It’s ‘Over Eight’, on the King’s Road.”

ERIN K:            “Oh my God! Don’t do that!”

TASH:            “No, it doesn’t exist anymore, it burned down. Don’t worry about it.”

WCS:           “Moving on… Mark wants to know: ‘Where did your inspiration for the song  about a chode come from?’ Who has actually seen a chode?”

They look at each-other.

Erin points at Tash.

ERIN K: “She’s the one that’s seen it.”

TASH: “Erm, no.”

ERIN K. “Erm, yes!”

TASH: “Well… not exactly.”

ERIN K: “Shuddup! Tell him the story!”

TASH: “Well… its about a small dick, I guess.”

Erin K. turns to me determinedly,

ERIN K: “No-no-no, a chode is a dick that is wider than it is long.”

TASH: “Yeah—but its not like they exist in real life. At least I don’t think they do. I mean… I can’t imagine one.”

WCS: “No, probably not. Unless you’re a really fat midget.”

TASH: “I’ve never seen a chode.”

ERIN K: “She has.”

TASH: “Nope, it was only a really small penis.”

WCS: “Do you have something against small penis’?”

TASH: “No… I—“

ERIN K: “Yes we do! And she has seen a chode.”

TASH: “No, honestly, I’ve—“

WCS: “—For the sake of the interview?”

TASH: “Fine.”

She leans into the microphone,

TASH: “I’ve seen a chode! – It was gross and I wrote a song about it.”

- - - -

Their stage presence, though superficially loose, comes along with well-practiced ease — laughing in between songs and entertaining the audience’s whoops and hollers with a smile. They play without any sense of entitlement, only with what can be simply described as joy. They love being there and, in turn, you love them for it.

In listening to them, you receive an instant shot of familiar/empathetic understanding. They’re real people who have lived and loved (each-other, on occasion), gone places, screwed up, been screwed, won and lost battles across the no-man’s-land of emerging adulthood and survived it all to sing and play together on a green couch — poetic manifestations of the scuppered ship today’s creative youth are forced to toil on with little-to-no prospect of ever finding solace. They have day jobs — to pay the bills and as career backups, should their dream of playing music forever fail — but I will confide in you now, reader, I sure hope they don’t have those jobs for much longer. The world may be in a weird and decrepit state right now, in the midst’s of a transition that will gradually hand it over to the usurping youth, but I’d find a healthy dose of calm knowing somewhere in the world Erin K. & Tash are together on a green couch, laughing and singing about how small your penis is.

Love & Ganja @ Mr. Kyps

            Ras I Ray had a grin plastered on his face for the entire show and now, as the bassist and leader of the band known as the Easy Star All Stars, he loomed above me, his visibly ancient dreadlocks reaching down to his waist and barely below my eye level, still grinning to all hell. “Its about the love—if that’s the word ya wanna use,” he tells me. My heart was attacking my chest cavity with a certain amount of vigor at this point. It had only taken ten minutes spent outside the back of the concert hall bullshitting and chain smoking cigarettes with the saxophonist-- just enough for me to sufficiently convince the doughy brass in charge of security that I was an eager music journalist from a respectful publication... so obviously not the case that I was left mute for a moment as I double-checked in my head that I was actually about to be given permission to go back stage. It was cold that night in Poole but I seemed to be sweating harder than Mike Tyson would if asked to spell the words 'professional boxer'. “But more than that, more than getting that love” the Rasta continued, “it’s about giving that love back. Giving that feeling back.”

My notes from that evening in Poole are rather garbled and illegible, growing increasingly nonsensical as I continued through the evening an opponent-less bout of competitive drinking – “Krma Plice! Arrt THAT man!” – and the shorthand transcriptions of the several interviews I conducted were completely unintelligible, no matter how much rum I drank in an effort to somehow understand them. Luckily, I had recognized my complete lack of motor skills before I interviewed Ras I Ray and a journalism friend had agreed to transcribe our conversation. 
I had been riding on a double-edged high the entire night – that legal, wish-washy “high-on-life” sort of feeling you get when watching a band you love perform and a certain herbal, less legal, high, facilitated by a freakish Jew from Scotland in the grips of a mid-life crisis that made him say things like "Wuddup bruv, my homies call me Shultz."

     In my tangled state, the final words the indomitable Rasta left me with looped through my head as I searched for a spectral meaning behind them. “Its about the love…” I repeated it in my head, tapping my pen anxiously on my notepad as I walked valiantly from the backstage accommodations at Mr. Kyps – Poole’s poor answer for the Fillmore East. But what kind of love? Bob – Marley, not Dylan – sang incessantly about love. Not the kind you might hear come from the heaving chest of whatever lollipop songstress MTV has chosen to molest at the time, but a transcendent love, a worldly love. I'm reminded of a piece of wisdom Desmond Tutu once imparted on the world, “Giving is more blessed than receiving… Because in giving, although it doesn’t seem so, you receive.” Ras I Ray was obviously privy to this concept when he took the stage that Friday night in Poole.  

Despite financial difficulties, getting into Mr. Kyps was the easy part. A week before, I phoned the offices and, in a highly professional tone, informed the squeaky receptionist that I was a music journalist, a concert reviewer for a magazine in the good ol’ Yew Ess’uf Ay, and I would be covering the Easy Star gig. I made sure to get all the information out in one breath, it being imperative that I come across as someone who has done this before and expects expedient service, and she politely forwarded me on to somebody that could actually help me.

“Ya? Ben Grange here.”

“Is this Mister Kyps?” I asked, tongue in cheek.

“Yes. May I ask who this is?”

“Wait... you just said that you are Ben. Is Mr. Kyps around?” Abbott and Costello would have been proud of the following exchange.

“This is Mr. Kyps. This is—“

“No, you just said you were Ben Grange.”

“I am Ben Grange—“

“Are you?”

“—and this is Mr. Kyps – yes I am! WHO is this?”

“Stevenson!” I told him. The military teaches you many things, but the ability to announce yourself with authority and gusto was far better utilized than any half-baked survival technique. “I’m a journalist – music mostly – forget about that crazy ol’ Kypsie for now, you can help me.” I paused and the line went silent. I went on, satisfied I had confused and annoyed him enough to give me free entry in exchange for no longer having to entertain to my ADD fueled whimsy. “I will be needing press access to the Easy Star gig on Friday. Two, actually. My photographer will be with me, but don’t worry about him, he’s harmless in comparison to the rest of em. You two would get on, I imagine.”


- the rest of conversation was lost in the rain -

Originally formed in 1997 for Easy Star Records’ earliest recordings, the Easy Star All-Stars were an amalgam of the label’s artists thrown together, operating entirely as a studio entity until they released Dub Side of the Moon in 2003. The group, which operates as a collective with a rotating cast of musicians and singers, was put together by the unimportant and face-less co-founders of Easy Star Records. Their fame stems from a day in the studio when they foolhardily decided to do a “dub” on Pink Floyd’s iconic album “Dark Side of the Moon.” It was this album that would bring Easy Star All Stars to the attention of not only the reggae scene, but to fans of music in and of itself.

“We were just in the studio one day when someone suggested we play Dark Side” said Menny More after the show. “We didn’t know it was gonna be so good. When I heard the final cut I was amazed.”

After the success of Dub Side, East Star went on to cover equally historic albums, dubbing the Beetles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band as well as Radiohead’s piéce de résistance, OK, Computer. Ignoring record sales and fan hearsay, the entire band cites Dub Side as their biggest achievement, its immense popularity in turn justifying Easy Star’s cover of one of modern music’s greatest albums—a statement less hyperbolic than it may seem.

- - - - 

The concert began with an air of suspicion. Easy Star started the set out with several tracks of their own, songs of which the audience was abundantly ignorant of as they forcibly swayed in anticipation of the band turning it up to the proverbial ‘Eleven’.

The kick in the ass the audience needed eventually came in the form of Sgt. Peppers. The thumping electric bass from Ras I Ray combined with the instantly recognizable, fully gained electric riff introduced the song. It seems useless to describe how the crowd reacted to this. For anyone that has been to any sort of concert, you know the feeling. Your heart constricts and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as the crowd roars in acknowledgement of the song that has begun. The Caucasian Dreadlocks started swinging and with that the sweet smell of ganja permeates the room—your nostrils flare and your mouth waters. This is what we were waiting for: a real reggae concert.

The crescendo of the set came when Ras I Ray took the microphone for the first time, introducing the band and consequently the next song. “Me-a know ya gonna know dis heya song so it really don’t need no introduction” he said. With that he took to his bass and played the band in. Karma Police. Though I myself was not as familiar with Radiohead, the audience obviously was. They swayed and sang in unison as if Karma Police was the only song they were waiting to hear. They loved it. The band loved it. The band tightened and loosened at the same time, notes became crisper as musical rigidity gave way to the power of improvisation and everyone under the dark and hazy roof of Mr. Kyps that night lost themselves in the music as a singular sense, usurped of priority from all others as the haunting ska beat of Karma Police filled our ears.

And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself.

I knew why Ras I Ray had described that feeling the way he did. It wasn’t a product of the affected ‘artist within’, nor was it an off the cuff comment to a pestering and posing journalist. The word itself is used far too carelessly these days –Love, that is – but coming from him it had meaning beyond the spectral and superficial definition we have given to the one emotion man-kind seems hell-bent on feeling/finding. It was the only word available in the English lexicon to describe the transcendent emotion that exists only as a bi-product from a series of tightened and tuned strings struck at different intervals to produce wavelengths that will vibrate off your eardrum pleasantly as the harmonious wavelengths streak through the Medulla Oblongata to play with your heart before the flood gates are opened and dopamine seeps steadily into the blood-stream.

And so, as I look back on the concert, the one thing that remains burned to my frontal lobe was the smile on that Dreadlock’s face. He knew it and now so did I. It was the perfect description. It was Love. And at the end of the day its just damn nice to know that one of the few people left tending the ever-fading flame of love/music is a dreadlock Rasta from Jamaica, using it to light his spliff.

Eros (Death) & Thanatos (Love)

The guitar intones on a half note, as if the track began recording at the end of some long-lost intro that we will never hear. Dylan sings out the opening lines, deadpan—

Darkness at the break of noon,

Shadows even the silver spoon,

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon.

To understand, you know too soon,

There’s no sense in trying.

I love that song. My facial muscles twitch a wry smile as I step out of  #5 Hurdwick Place in Camden Town—my new residence (at least for the next six months.) It’s a new day in London, my first of many to come, and as Bob desperately sings into my ears I can’t help but feel an overpowering sense of possibility — the feeling that underneath the lugubrious, gloomy sky that hangs low above London I can do anything and be anyone; blaze a proverbial trail through the streets of Londinium with Doc Brown in my wake telling passersby: “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit!”

Dylan keeps singing. The chorus, now off-beat, is juxtaposed beautifully with his manic strumming—

So don’t fear if you hear

A foreign sound to your ear.

Its alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.

            There is a palpable amount of fear that comes along with that sense of possibility I can’t seem to shake — people fail to reach their goals all the time. More often than not, if you ask me. Self-actualization is a tricky beast, hindered by innumerous feelings of self-doubt and idiosyncratic insecurities, many of which I am guilty of harboring. They hide in the basement of my psyche like runaway slaves in the sanctuary of Harriet Tubman’s home in Philadelphia. I’ve seen what happens when these insecurities are not released to freedom, to stand up and fight against injustice at Harper’s Ferry… its not pretty.

The disease and fear of becoming no one runs deep amongst the forever-young people of my home in Bermuda. We playfully call Bermuda “Neverland”, summoning images of the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, but its symptoms are far worse—

Temptation’s page flies out the door,

You follow, find yourself at war,

Watch waterfalls of pity roar,

You feel to moan but unlike before

You discover that you’d just be

One more person crying.

            —Arriving home to my island this summer I found, as I often do, my generation’s state far more depraved than when I left it. In the late hours of popular binge-drinking nights, people stumble through the dimly-lit streets of our capitol with an increased urgency and wobble in their step — designer shirts, soaked with sweat and booze, seem increasingly torn and unbuttoned to reveal its owner’s bronzed chest (of which they are always proud.) They are investment bankers, insurance mongers, party-boat captains, stay-at-home wives in waiting, wombs-for-rent, and they all seem to be searching for something. Something that for the life of them they cannot find. They are residents of the Hotel California, able to check out but unable to leave.

Advertising signs that con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done,

That can win what’s never been won,

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you.

Boys and girls that live year-round on the island (for you cannot call them men and women) mash lips and grope each other more and more in between trips to the bathroom to expel their evening’s glut. A scene in the cinematic realization of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the only allusion I can draw—when “Raoul Duke” is waiting for his room to be ready in the lobby of the hotel with a head full of acid, his hallucinations reaching a crescendo: “Terrible things were happening all around us…” He finds himself abandoned by his attorney at the bar. Tearing off his hat he looks around wildly, his gaze falling on a bowl of mixed nuts that morphs into grubs. A slimy limb dives in and pulls out a handful. He looks around and, as the camera zooms out from a close-up of his wild-eyed disbelief, he finds himself surrounded by oversized beasts bending each other over and guzzling their drinks: “I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things… It won’t be long now before they tear us to shreds.”

Good ol’ Gonzo had it right and I find it hard to argue against the depraved weltschmerz he so beautifully portrayed. Whether watching or reading that scene, I can’t help but feel I know what his acid-addled mind was manifesting. I feel I’m constantly surrounded by human-sized reptiles doing nothing but reproducing and guzzling grain alcohol in some half-assed attempt to find meaning in their lives beyond their evolutionary desire to spread their DNA. They are the ones that have given up, succumbed to Darwinian theory with nothing to live for beside the hope that one day they will find a suitable womb to fill or sperm to fertilize their precious and fleeting eggs. So they drink… perhaps to forget or distract from purpose and responsibility, all while fruitlessly searching for something—

While one who sings with his tongue on fire

Gargles in the rat race choir,

Bent out of shape by society’s pliers,

Cares not to come up any higher

But rather get you down

In the hole that he’s in.

I’ve managed to escape the atavistic orgy that occurs on my island throughout the year, much to the squelch of my mother’s wallet being purged. I’m unemployed, without a degree, and desperately clinging to the idea that hard-won experience is a lot harder to come by these days than a piece of paper saying you’ve done everything asked of you by your respective institution of so-called higher education.

So I carry my torch and wave it wildly at those that try to douse it—a modern realization of Mary Shelly’s beast, pieced together from the watered-down DNA of ancestral scribes like my estranged grandfather whose name I share, my humble and late father, on down to the man who wrote Treasure Island.

A question in your nerves is lit,

Yet you know there’s no question fit

To satisfy, insure you not to quit,

To keep in your mind and not forget

That it is not he or she or them or it

That you belong to.

            It’s a tricky beast, self-actualization. I’m on my way to finding it, I hope.

I step from my stoop, shirking mohawks and tight jeans, Italian suits and homeless boots. A car honks its horn, I cross the road to Camden High Street. Dylan hoots—

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards

False Gods, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough,

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs,

Kick my legs to crash it off,

Say okay, I’ve had enough

What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen,

They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

But its alright, Ma, its life and life only.

A Walking Contradiction - Hi ho!

Say the word ‘blog’ ten times over.

Disgusting, isn’t it?

‘Blog’ is an odious word, gurgling from the tongue and throat as cave-men might once have enunciated. It is a languishing blend of 21st Century lexicon—the kind that plagues the mobile airwaves with ‘LOL’ this and ‘ROFL’ that. It is both verb and noun (proper but without the right etiquette) and my personal sworn enemy alongside Rupert Murdoch and Lyndsay Lohan. And yet we must recognize it.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus:

/bläg/ noun

A personal website on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis

verb
(blogs, blogging, blogged)
Add new material to or regularly update a blog.

If you were blissfully unaware, the word ‘blog’ is the combination of the words ‘web’ and ‘log’ and the test-tube baby to the technocratic, ‘Look at Me!’ world we are forced to toil in today—kind of like how Spencer and Heidi became ‘Speidi’, Ben and Jennifer became ‘Bennifer’, and why 13 year-olds don’t grope each-other in dark corners of dance-halls anymore, choosing to ‘sext’ instead. Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' once triggered a Pavlovian response in the trousers of young boys waiting to slow-dance with the blonde from history class, now the closest thing they get to that sort of anticipation is waiting for a BBM from her (hopefully with boobies). I will even go so far as to say 'the blog' is a perfect metaphor for everything wrong in the world today.

That said… this is my blog.

Hi ho!

What is it about? Who-th’-fuck-knows. The vague idea is to produce a body of work centered around my current state of affairs: a young and pretentious writer without a job or money facing the every-day hell of living in London, England as an ex-patriate hypocrite-without-a-cause. O, there will be adventure! And drama! And laughter! And we shall sing together with arms linked and gaily skip down Fulham Road and Oxford Street together!

Hi ho!

Allowing myself the self-indulgent pleasures of this here web-log (thou shalt write the word ‘blog’ no more, my child), I will tell you that I am 22 years-of-age and a recent university drop-out for reasons which are perfectly justified to me and none of your goddamn business. The men on the paternal side of my family are/were all either journalists, novelists, travel-writers, and lovers of the ever-shrinking world, and I have spent my life (beginning at time immemorial) attempting to accomplish the long and self-defeating journey towards becoming ‘a writer’. With no fit and proper space to practice this skill, I shall do it here.

So please, come join me in my self-loathing adventure into the deep and vacuous streets of London as I stumble, pint in hand, towards self-actualization and existential horror.

Hi ho!

WCS