Call Us Legion For We Are Many

It has been brought to my attention that there are some people reading this blog who are under the age of thirty five, so I'll keep the references to masturbation to an absolute minimum, unless it's sexy.

We don't want anyone to panic but I'm afraid we might be going on strike in a month's time, so there could be a Ska shortage.   We're striking over appalling work conditions; do you know that we sometimes have to play up to a two hour set, with no toilet or cigarette break?  It's like a Dickensian novel.  As to the impending Ska shortage our advice is to panic.  Panic as much as you can.  If you are not running around with your hair on fire then you are not panicking enough which means that there is a good chance you don't understand the gravity of the situation.   You see our fragile economy is a lot like the board game Monopoly, except of course in Monopoly the rich pay taxes and occasionally go to jail.  It's a game nonetheless, and we have been left with no other move to play but industrial action.  No one underestimates the impact this will have.  Ska is used for many things; it powers our iPods, it's lubricates our radio telescopes, it's a vital component in the building and construction of pork pie hats.  So we take this very seriously.  We recommend stocking up on Ska, filling up jars of the stuff and burying it in the garden.  You'll need them after the apocalypse.  Also take all your money out of the bank, sell your house and download as many copies of 'A Fistful of Dynamite', our award winning Punk album, as your hard drive will permit.  I would suggest buying extra hard drives to fill up with Ska, but honestly, you don't have the time, just go to iTunes now and email us all your money.

Now I know what you're thinking.  Is this not a diabolical scheme on our part to inflate the Ska bubble?  Aren't we using our insider knowledge to cynically create the panic of a Ska shortage to manipulate people into spending money, thereby avoiding a second straight month of zero economic growth, and thus avoiding a ska recession?  That's crazy talk, and possibly slanderous.  Only a bunch of right fucking assholes would do that.  We're more like loveable idiots than assholes, and anyway we don't have that much insider knowledge.  We get most of our information from Colin, and he gets all his news of current affairs from the radio in Grand Theft Auto, so you see we have our own problems.  Like everyone else we have financial difficulties and are exploring all sorts of new avenues to raise cash.  Just the other day we were talking about buying Rangers Football Club from the adminstrators, for two pounds, and turning them into the world's most expensive Ska band.  It's not as deranged as it sounds, they have twenty thousand fans who turn up and pay through the nose to see them play a ninety minute set every week.  Imagine if we could harness the power of Rangers and use them for good, by turning them into a Ska band.  They would be formidable.  We didn't buy them in the end, because of the tax thing, and put the money towards a twelve pack of Stella instead, a much more sensible investment in these turbulent times.  So it's back to our original plan, 'Bombskare Presents - Karl Marx: The Musical, starring Andy P as Karl Marx, Murray Graham as Jenny Marx, and Papa Joe as Marx's Theory of Value.  It's bound to be a money spinner, which would be ironic.

We've been busy recently.  We have been building yet another stunt drummer to add to the ranks of our elite unit of Ska drummers for our ever busier Ska commitments, and it is a difficult business.  Building a basic, stand-alone drummer is easy of course, you can buy a kit online from soyouneedanidiottoplaydrums.com, but programming them for Ska is tricky and potentially hazardous.  Eye protection should be worn at all times.  And a gum shield.  Once you've programmed the basics, you know, left and right, one-two-three-four, you then have to install the Bombskare update, which is a massive download, lots of complicated patches and security modifications, much bigger than Windows Service Pack 3.   You also have to be very careful installing it correctly or the subject can become dangerously psychotic with a messianic complex, and that's the last thing you want; the second coming of Jesus and he turns out to be a drummer.  Yes, I'll never forgive myself for what happened with Cammy.  There's no Windows help file to sort that out.  However no such problems this time around, we definitely are getting better at constructing cyborg Ska rythm machines from the future.  Drumbot 6.0 aka David Morrison is working out well.  We had a quiet warm up gig last week down at our buddy Baz's party so that Dave could try out the Bombskare set before his first proper gig with us, down in London next week.  He passed his basic training no problems.  Next step is his advanced training which involves two full days with the band, a lot of alcohol, a lot of inappropriate touching and of course the exciting possibility of blind, ugly violence.

We've also been down at Chamber Studio recording with our buddy Graeme Young.  Chamber is a fantastic studio and it was great to work there again.  The tracks sound great, especially considering how difficult it was to record and mix everything live.  A lot of people don't appreciate how much effort and time goes into multi-track recording these days, it's meticulous and detail-oriented, so this was a step back in time to how they recorded half a century ago, back when boy bands roamed the earth.  In fact the earliest multi track techniques were developed by the German's in the 1940's, at a time when you would have thought they would have been busy.  They pioneered the earliest stereo technology which was developed specifically so that Hitler could improve the quality of his bands demo tapes.  He played bass in a jazz/funk trio called 'The Adolf Hitler Funk Catastrophe'.  It's all there on Wikipedia.  Big thanks to Toni Martone at Critical State and to Graeme and the boys at Chamber Studios who did a cracking job recording Bombskare in one go, so to speak, in all our raw glory.  We are the Mount Everest of recording live bands, but they managed to scale us, and fortunately no one fell to their deaths or had to resort to cannibalism.  Three new tracks written for the occasion; 'Granton Ska Cause', 'Honeymoon Without The Wedding', and 'Wake and Bake'.  Also an old tune of ours 'Yellow Pages', that we hilariously kept forgetting to record every time we went into the studio, because of the stupid.  Not this time.  The new tunes were still being written as we started recording them, which is a bit stupid, but what can we say, we don't like to make it easy for ourselves.  So why record in this way when we can record digitally?  Because it's there.

While we're on the subjects of death, cannibalism and hilariously forgetting things, we will be supporting The Skatalites once again, which is a pretty emotional thing for all of us, and for our patron saint, Zombie Lloyd Knibb.  As mentioned last year, Zombie Lloyd Knibb currently inhabits a steel cage in our lab, that's right we have a lab.  Actually it's the Top Secret Ska Research Institute, where we've been developing lots of Ska related technology, for example a trumpet that blows itself and puts itself back in the case after the gig, an atomic death trombone with electric shock collar, and a prototype for an inflatable hammond organ.  However I'm not sure how Zombie Lloyd feels about The Skatalites new drummer.  I've asked him about it frequently and his response is mainly the same,  'Brains! Need Brains!'  I have to say though, I don't agree with Zombie Lloyd's assessment.  Frankly dude, you don't need that many brains, I mean it's not Rush.  I'm sure the new guy will be fine.  Just like our new guy.

Another thing, people should be aware that when they are contacting the band on any of our social networking sites, all five hundred of of them, is that they are potentially talking to nine different people, a schizophrenic nine headed ska demon if you will, so we sometimes have some communication problems.  For instance, we were told ages ago, but I only just found out, that some of our music has been appearing on file sharing sites.  I'm actually quite impressed that we are worth bootlegging, like a cheap whiskey.  Fill your boots that's what I say.

One last thing, in commemoration of the Titanic disaster one hundred years ago, we will be playing at Studio 24, our first time back there since our album launch party in February 2009.  What better way to commemorate freezing to death and drowning in the North Sea, than to drown in sweat, boil to death and suffocate at a Bombskare gig here in Edinburgh.  Die happy, people, you know you want to.