I quite literally just received this (Thanks Laura!). The long-awaited follow up to "Go Get Goo Goo" is "Five Steps Ahead" and it's gonna be walking all over us courtesy of Sounds of Subterranea in March!! More info as it becomes available...

Mr Helsing wishes it to be known that...

THE THANES - A NIGHT IN GREAT KING STREET 10" LP - LARSEN (LZ079) It's here...NOW! The new 10" live LP by Scottish garage-beat purveyors THE THANES - A NIGHT IN GREAT KING STREET - issued on fabulous French label Larsen (LZ079). Features never before issued tracks, such as the group's urgent cover of the Q65 nugget "I Despise You", plus many on-stage favourites, including "The Lovely Laura-Anne", "It's Just A Fear" and "The Next One". Start bugging your local record shoppe to order your copy, like now!"

Other news... Got an e-mail from Tony Blair this morning. Me and 1.8 million+ others. It had to be rescued from my junk mail. This was because I signed the road pricing petition that's been in the headlines. And actually, I'm not so much against road pricing as I am agin the tracking that it would allow the all-enveloping surveillance industry to undertake. Lord knows, is the mobile phone epidemic not hellish enough. Not that there's much to glean about my comings and goings but it's the principle. Actually, if there was a halfway decent public transport infrastructure then I wouldn't even have a bloody car. However, the likelihood of such a thing in this backwater is slimmer than a very slim thing on the proverbial slim-athon slimfast diet.

Taken to yon logical conclusion, if I didn't have to earn a crust then I'd seldom leave the house at all. But anyway, all this guff with carbon footprints, etc., until our co-habitees in burgeoning economies start screwing the napper then there's little or nothing our hapless attempts to restrict climate change can do. We're on the rocket people, but what you can do is resolve not to waste energy for your own self. Nobody else. Just you. I also had to listen to some bollocks about "ethical trading" from someone who gets printing done in China rather than here in the UK where the triple standard and creative accountancy reign supreme. Pity about my fellow travellers who are just trying to get by. Anyway, I guess Tony didn't catch any of the Hold Steady shows because there was no mention of them in his message. Or maybe they're not britpop enough. That could be it. I'm tempted to make a sinking shjips crack but I can't be arsed.