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My little brother was on Skype with me a minute ago. He said, “will you be watching it?”
“What do you think?” I spat, disbelievingly.
“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking, ” he said.
“NO!” I said.
“NO?” he said, yet more disbelievingly, ”why not? 2 billion people will be watching it! Something might happen!”
“If something happens, we’ll hear about it,” I said.
Sometimes I get the impression that Zef thinks I’m no fun.
Well, I get my fun. And most of the fun I’ve managed to extract from this foul publicity stunt/dastardly power harnessing ritual has involved making this remix, which I did for Eddy Temple Morris’ XFM show last week. I now present it to you, as a present. Feel free to smash some television sets to it.
Suddenly I’m in Westminster. Union Jacks and cops everywhere. I used to have a recurring nightmare that looked just like this. Only in my nightmare, the sky is the colour of a fresh wound, and the pavement cracks open like a scab. The cops lift their visors and they have no eyes in their skulls, just holes, and I am plunged into the heaving acid bowels of the earth.
In so called real life, on April 27 2011 AD, the sun blasts like a lazer through a mile of lethal pollution to illuminate a thousand tourists filming a thousand union jacks that hang still in the thick air like a thousand giant tongues. Teenage girls dance in slow motion for the cameras in Beatles T-shirts and backpacks with red and blue targets sewn on to them. Cops stare straight ahead, flexing guns that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger used them on the set of Predator. They don’t look real. I think, well, they’re not, are they? Gently down the stream.
Yesterday I heard a spokeswoman for the London Metropolitan Police Force making unveiled threats of extreme violence against anyone considering doing anything other than prostrating themselves at the feet of two pink flesh sacks in central London this coming Friday. This coming Friday, in Central London, if you are not prostrating yourself at the feet of two pink fleshsacks, the goons have been encouraged to “Shoot On Sight”. The woman demanded that people do their civic duty and report anyone looking suspicious, talking negatively of the pink fleshsacks, or bearing inappropriate placards.
“This is a day of celebration,” she said.
(I’d be bloody celebrating if everybody was legally obliged to pay for MY wedding. My beautiful fiancée had her little heart set on a room in the Union Chapel, until they told us how much it was going to cost.)
Anyway, I for one appreciate the Police’s honesty. It is good that they take the time to remind us who they actually work for (Rich People) and what their job is (protecting rich people from us). From the front pages I’ve seen, it appears the Press are keen to remind us who they work for (Rich People) and what their job is too (Relay The Rich Person Agenda, Make You Feel Inferior), and while I haven’t seen a television screen for a while, I can bet they’re doing the same thing.
Good on ‘em. I, meanwhile, am fully aware of my role, and that is being my goddamn ill-ass self, and I solemnly promise to do that until I fall downa scab hole into the centre of the goddamned earth.
I am so serious about this, in fact, that I have shaved all the hair off of my face for the first time since 2003.
WOAH!
Serious. Last time that happened me and Wade both did it at the same time, then spent about 7 minutes staring at ourselves forlornly in the mirror wailing, “we look like CHINLESS DWARVES!”
After our carefree, happy childhoods had died with the horrorful onset of premature adolescence at around 7 or 8 years old, so too had our prepubescent self confidence and we had been forced, with the aid of our beards, to start again, to carve ourselves anew in the image of our gods.
So we resolved never to shave that close again again, lest the world discover our true nature, and we hid, handsomely, behind our follicular miracles.
Seven years have passed since that day, brothers and sisters, seven years I have hidden my true flesh-face beneath a mask of lovely hair, and just as all my cells have regenerated themselves, so too has my confidence in my imperfect perfection as a human fleshsack with some magic in it. I have wandered in the desert and I have walked the earth, and I have found it to not give a shit about the strength of chins.
YES!
Forsooth! I am here today to tell you that while I definitely prefer the look of myself resplendent in the beard my lower-case god gave me to keep myself cosy and safe in, I am not afraid to show you that I have a weak-ass chin beneath it all! For that is But Material, and But Material is some unfuturistic shit! We are living in the future now! We are in the process of Transcending!
Amen.
Hopefully it grows back by Friday, I don’t want the police to shoot me and my picture end up in the paper looking like this.
ONLY JOKING!
I’m going to ignore all that silly nonsense and carry on with my great works like a goddamn G!
How about you?
Anyway. I must get back to work. I hope you’re having a lovely day.
PAX!
PS – the picture up top was drawn on the spot at the famous Garage show we did a few weeks back by Oliver Hull.
PPS – I had that song up there on repeat for most of the writing of this post. It is by Martin Carr’s Black Serpent Choir and it is amazing.
Seek A Sound So Rare originally appeared on The Kidnapping Of Akira The Don By Joey2tits. It’s working title was Beck, because Joseph (AKA Joey2tits) thought the beat he’d made with Jim (AKA Evil James Harrison I, fellow Ysgol Friars alumni) sounded a bit Beck-ish. Which was timely, as I’d been spending a fair amount of time pondering my whole racism-against-scientologists issue.
I wrote the song very quickly – much of it had come to me whilst cycling, as was the way with a lot of the Kidnapping material. I’d cycle along the edge of the canal between Hackney Wick and Walthamstow with no hands with instrumentals in my ears, freestyling out loud and furiously typing the best bits into my Blackberry (RIP).
I’d been wanting to put the line A Flight Of Stairs Falling Down a Flight Of Stairs into a song ever since I read it in Simon Williams’ review of an early Idelwild gig in the NME a decade earlier, and here, finally, was a beat that really did sound like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs. Clatter! Crash! Pow! Naturally, the stairs thing got me thinking about pushing my little brother down the stairs when I was 2, which lead me to those those beautiful mullets my Dad gave us (and his hilarious Boy Named Sue excuse). It all felt very right, anyway. I do not know why these things happen the way they do, but if knew all the mysteries of the universe I’d be an Oracle of some sort, and I wouldn’t have time to write pop songs, so we can all consider ourselves most fortunate.
The video, just like the song, was made by me, Joey and Jim. I ran about in my shiny purple tracksuit and my beloved Pedo Bear Pope T-Shirt, and Joey and Jim filmed me running around Hackney Wick, and shouted at me to run faster, and that sort of thing. At one point I was cycling around Victoria Park with Joey and his camera strapped to my back like some vast giggling Kola Bear, and we Did Not Crash, and neither did we Die in a Ball of Flames, and that is because we are motherfucking ProFessionAls.
Joey did the awesome (and in some places rather creepy) animations, and Jim edited the video, which was the first time he ever did such a thing in his life, and I am very bloody impressed with the lad.
Annoyingly, I don’t have a picture of us all from the shoot, so here’s one of me and Joey on a swing.
Living In The Future is available in the following futuristic combinations:
Boy oh boy! Keeping a blog is a serious business in this Strange Year Of Our Lord, 2000 and Tumblr. Why spend an hour writing seventeen painstaking paragraphs when you could simply reblog an image of a stormtrooper photoshoped onto a hamster and type lol wut underneath it?
But then, you might as well ask, why learn to cartoon on a level with Bill Waterson when you could just copy paste a Rage fffffface to get your point across?
Its a stupid question. There is no Simply and there is no Just. There is an art to creating the perfect rage strip as alchemic and un-bottleable as that magic employed by Waterson, who is, it should be noted, a lone comics genius. A profound uniqueness of the Rage Comic is that it is being constantly refined by the mass collective CONSCIOUS, rather than the lone cartoonist’s connection to the collective UNconcious.
These are the things I ponder on the tube on the way back from a fine afternoon spent having my photograph taken eating a barrel full of fruit in a luxurious astroturfed garden in West London, and being asked commendably well-researched questions by world famous comedian and radio personality Danny Robins for Uppror magazine.
The luxurious astroturfed garden belonged to the photographer, whose home I was welcomed into by his radiant woman and twins, who bought me drinks and fruit, which I was then encouraged to spit at the camera, which is actually harder than it sounds. It transpired that our host is an old friend of my Irish-Swedish Los Angles residing Stunner brother Wade Xavier Crescent, and took some legendary pictures of the aforementioned that used to adorn our living room wall.
As for Danny Robbins, I didn’t realise who he was until he opened his mouth, upon which instance I recognised him straight away as the voice of the Indie Travel Guide on Huey Morgan’s excellent BBC 6 Music show (RIP), and I am happy to report that he was a gentleman, a scholar (he’d done a damn sight more research than printing off my Wikipedia page, at any rate), and, awesomely enough, came second in the 2006 Air Guitar Championships. He taught me three secret air guitar styles, which was deeply generous of him.
I finished Safe Area Goražde on the train, and when I raised my weary, teary eyes from the page a choir of angels seemed to sing to me, by which I mean to say it was a truly transformative and transcendental experience, that affected me deeply, and whose effects I expect to last the rest of my lifetime. It filled me, as great art often does, with a great and overpowering love for my fellow man, and I had half a mind to hug everybody in the carriage, spitting venom as they all were because we’d been stuck between stations in the glorious April heat for about 4 and a half minutes. “OMFG, look at us!” I wanted to shout, “We’re not getting shot and shelled and raped! This is the greatest day of our lives, and tomorrow will be even greater! Let us boogie!”
But I didn’t. I have done similar before and I will again, but today, I didn’t.
What I did do was come home and work on my mix for Eddy-Temple Morris‘ show on XFM. He’s doing Exposure all week, on which he dropped Jamieas his Xposure Hot One last night. G. Uppercase G. Anyway, it’s going to be a flipping legendary mix, and I am doing a very awesome and Prescient NEW THING for it specially, so you’ll be able to hear that TOMORROW.
Also tommorrow, you’ll be ale to see the SEEK A SOUND SO RARE video!
My Dr Of Publicity has been holding on to it today, doing Publicity Doctoring with it.
I am also filming ANOTHER video tomorrow, which you’ll be able to see NEXT WEEK.
Blimey!
Oh, and I went and had a look at a venue to have a party in. There will be much to celebrate: my new company, the end of the tour and oh yeah, MY NEW ALBUM! Yeah! Many great reasons! So JUNE 2nd! Save that date! Its gonna be some unrepeatable LEGENDARY SHIT, and if you miss it you will regret it forever.
Just saying.
Me and DJ Jack Nimble hooked up to discuss that sort of stuff yesterday. DJ Jack Nimble has an incredible robot collection. You really should see it sometime. Rare shit.
Anyway. I am going to stop all my excitable blathering now and go to bed with my feeyans and watch Aliens. We watched Alien last night. It hasn’t lost a touch of its genius. Did I ever tell you about the time Bruce Dickinson flew me to Paris on his Iron Maiden plane with a load of music journalists and I didn’t want to hang out with them all day so I went and watched Alien in the Cinema, dubbed into French? I loved that experience so much.
Oh, speaking of aliens, if you have nothing to listen to, you could do worse than this interview with Nigel Kerner and Andrew Silverman from Red Ice… they discuss the Shroud of Turin and how it relates to so-called extra terestrials, unforce, atomic expression, the godverse, synthetic roboidal beings (greys) and the uninterupted genetic scope of humanity, which is some interesting shit, and should give you some weird shit to ponder if nothing else.
Don Studios II, III, IV, Cafe 2tits, Stephen Hague's Mansion
Produced by
Akira The Don, Joey2tits & Stephen Hague
Mixed by
Akira The Don, Joey2tits & Stephen Hague
Mastered by
Gaz Williams @ Fliskin Manor
Artwork by
Zef: Design. Charlotte Whewell: Photo
Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present to you, my first compilation album, and the second long playing release from a company called Living In The Future:
LIVING IN THE FUTURE
▼
YES!
Available right now from all iTunes, Amazon and all major digital retailers, worldwide. Sixteen classic Akira The Don songs, thirteen of which were previously only available on akirathedon.com. They’ve been remixed, revocalled, reworked, and professionally mastered for your listening pleasure.
As you may recall, last year I asked you what your favourite post WWWY songs were, for the following reason:
“…to those that don’t frequent this wonderful, groundbreaking, epoch defining website, I might as well have died in 2006. So we need to edumacate their asses, before we hit them upside the head with The Life Equation, and change the course of history for ever and ever. What I want to do is this – to put together an EP (extended play) of my finest works, following the release of When We Were Young up until now, the eve of The Life Equation. I will take these recordings, polish them up, treat them with respect and love, give them the mastering I was never able to before, and release them into the world, where anybodycan find them.”
The response was vast and deeply enlightening. I took your advice, made a list of a hundred odd songs, whittled that list down to my favourites, whittled that down to my favourites that didn’t have great big fuck off unclearable samples in them, then I worked out which out of those worked best together and told a story as a whole sequence, then I re-vocalled and remixed a bunch of them, added new music, and beats, made the whole lot work together melodically and thematically, then I added Jamie to the mix, which was a song me and Stephen Hague did that we loved but didn’t fit in The Life Equation, then I wrote The Way Back Home to finish that story, and lead into the next.
Phew! That was a big-ass sentence lashed together with nothing but commas, but I think it got the point across.
This, ladies and gentlemen of the akirathedon.com community of ladies and gentlemen, is my first compilation record. It wouldn’t have been possible without you.
Thank you.
Incidentally, I promised to record the names of those that helped choose the contents of this record on the CD’s liner notes, and I have kept my word.
Living In The Future is available in the following futuristic combinations:
Things are astoundingly on track for theLiving In The Future release (hahaha! On track! I did an accidental lol!). I had a hardcore and exciting meeting with my team on Wednesday, to whihc I took pointers and an agenda and carried them out, like a G. The music is percolating in the digitalchannels, ready to burst to life when midnight strikes on April 17th, and the 18th becomes real. The T-shirts gave been screen printed by the nimble and work-unshy hands of my guy Guy round the corner in Hommerton, the LITF labels are done, (see above) and on their way from Canada to London, where they will be stitched into those aforementioned fine organic cotton garments on Monday morning (lookit them up there, ain’t they beautiful?). The posters and flyers have been printed in South London, and the badges arrived on Wednesday, well ahead of time and lovingly hand-made by Manda-Rin from Bis.
Amazing huh! Although you’ll notice I didn’t mention the CDs.
Eek.
The CDs are NOT ON TIME.
OH NOES!
But they are on a track. They are in In The Process Of Creation… so that’s good. See, due to the impacts of The So-Called Recession, the people I used to use to make my ceedees have stopped doing so-called short runs (4000 and under), and everyone else has either gone out of business and or gone crazy with their prices, so it took a bloody age to find a decent one that wasn’t £500 more than I paid last time. But I did, ladies and Gs, I did, and the CDs will be with us around a week after the 18th.
So that’s pretty good really. One thing that hasn’t gone perfectly out of a chain of many things. I am not doing too badly at this running a whole company on my own thing. And the good thing is that I am getting the CDs for the NEXT project made at the SAME TIME as these, so they will actually be ready in advance. Amazing!
Thank you to everybody that’s been posting the Jamie video and player on their sites and facebooks and stuff. It’s invaluable, it’s what keeps the thing alive. Please keep it up. Jamie makes its radio debut (that I know of, anyway), on XFM tonight, and Eddy-Temple Morris has asked me to do a mix for next weeks Remix which is exciting, so, with your help and the will of my lord and master Asterix The Gaul, I shall be starting to reach out of these here internets into the 3rd dimension and shit. Like this:
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
OMG THIS IS SO MY JAM 
