This blog has been quiet for donkey’s years now. Yet still people come here. If you want a more up to date version of this site go here . I’ve gone a bit Holy at the minute, but that won’t last.

… that I’ve got a new version of this ‘ere McBlog over at http://bpperry3.blogspot.com/

It was Christmas Eve and Ebenezer Doherty was ripped to the tits on heroin again. His assistant, young Mr. Willoughby, had spent all day mopping up his employer’s shit and wasn’t exactly full of Christmas cheer.

“I can’t say I’m happy about this, sir,” grumbled Willoughby, “I wanted to get home to the wife and kids but instead find myself clearing shit off the floor because you’re too deranged to go to the toilet, you dirty bastard. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s Christmas tomorrow.”

Doherty fixed Willoughby with a gimlet eye,

“Christmas indeed?” he muttered, vomiting on his shoes, “Christmas be-damned sir! What need have I for Christmas when I have drugs and booze and some sort of career in the music industry?! Have a care to keep your blasted Christmas to y’self Willoughby!”

“Oh, don’t you worry, I will sunshine! I’m off! Feel free to wallow in your own filth on someone else’s time you ungrateful runt!” bellowed the assistant as he thundered out the door.

“Christmas!” Doherty laughed to himself as he farted blood across the carpet, “A shallow time for baubles, broken promises and empty-headed sentiments! I’ll have no Christmas in this house unless it comes heroin-shaped and out of a syringe!” At which point he collapsed into a coma.

*    *    *

Several hours later, Doherty was awoken by an eerie noise. Appearing before his crusty eyes was the ghostly apparition of his ex-business partner Carl Barat, who had died from obscurity the year before,

“What manner of devilry is this?” said Doherty, reaching for the scotch, “Why d’ye plague me, Barat? Are you a fiendish trick of the light p’raps? No! I’ll wager you’re nothing but an illusion of the mind brought on by a surfeit of ecstasy tablets and eight-balls!”

“Silence Doherty!” wailed the ghost, “Take heed of these words, vagabond! This night ye’ll be visIted by three ghosts of such fearful countenance they’ll have ye trembling in your boots! Expect the first ghost when the bell tolls one, for this night ye’ll learn the true meaning of Christmas, my friend … that’s if you can keep awake long enough, you fucking waster.”

“Away with ye, spirit!” replied Doherty, “Your ethereal threats hold no terrors for me! Why, I’ve held witness to visions so horrifying they would strip the sanest man of his mind! I fear not your spectres!”

And with that he went to bed, unaware of the curious events that awaited him this night.

*    *    *

The sounds of the city did not disturb Doherty, but when the bells of St. Martin’s tolled, he awoke with a start, caked in excrement. In amazement he beheld, at the foot of his bed, the ghostly figure of old Keith Moon.

“Merry Christmas Doherty,” said the spirit, “I am the Ghost Of Christmas Past and I think I’m ‘ere to show you the meaning of Christmas. To be honest my memory’s not what it was, so if I’ve got the wrong bloke, I apologise. You are Ebenezer Doherty aren’t ye?”

“Yes I am, damn you! Away with ye, ghost! And where’s my crack-pipe, blast your eyes?”

“No time for that,” replied Moon, “Unless I’ve completely got my wires crossed, you’re booked in for a journey into the past! Come along …”

“I’ll swim through blood first!” shouted Doherty. But before he could grab even a bottle of laudanum, the ghost had him by the hand and out of the window.

*    *    *

Through the night they flew, Moon giggling all the way as Doherty cursed him for a knave,

“Damn and blast, but will you let me down demon?! The clouds are no place for a man lest they be chemically induced within his fevered mind!” he cried, “And more to the point, I haven’t had a fix in two hours!”

“Oh stop your bleedin’ natter will you?” answered the ghost, “We’re ‘ere now!”

And as they descended from the clouds, Doherty was witness to an incredible sight,

“Behold!” said the spectre, “Before your eyes are the spirits of those who chose the path of excess over the wholesome, family message of Christmas! These men died early because they saw getting blow-jobs off schoolgirls as more important than the festive message of Jesus and the Queen and that. And unlike Clliff, Daniel O’Donnell, The Corrs, and Slade, they’ve paid the price with their lives! In their tormented faces you see … oh hello there, Jimi, is that a Creme de Menthe? Give us a gleg, I’m spitting feathers ‘ere.”

And with that, all hopes of using ghosts to forces Doherty to see the error of his ways were dashed. Keith Moon was gone, disappearing among the throng in pursuit of a bird with really, really big tits.

“Hey hang about!” cried Doherty, somewhat perplexed, “How am I meant to get home then eh?”

“Oh don’t worry about that, dear boy, ” said Brian Jones, “Pull up a chair and relax, man. Here, have a double vodka and lemonade …”

*    *    *

“Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!” roared Doherty as he awoke in his own bed, “What hell-spawned creature of the night had the nerve to break into my house, mess up my hair, steal all my money, and shit in my mouth?”

And then he remembered his journey with Keith Moon. He remembered the netherworld of the past. He remembered the dead rock stars he’d got bladdered with. He remembered the famous supermodel who’d sucked his balls dry (and whose name has been removed from this tale for legal reasons).

“Ye Gods, the party!” he cried, “My, but a lesson or two about Christmas was learned that night, I fancy!”

And with that he ran to the window and pushed the panes ajar. Upon the pavement he espied a young lad, on his way to work this wintry morning,

“You there, boy!” he shouted, “Tell me, what day is this?”

“Why sir, I thought it common knowledge what day it is? ‘Tis Boxing Day, sir! One day’s hence from Saviour’s Day!” replied the boy.

“Ha Ha! I’ve missed it! I’ve missed it! I’ve missed damnable, accursed Christmas with its mince pies and Only Fools & Horses Yuletide spectaculars! No chestnuts roasting on an open fire! No Jack Frost nibbling at my nose! No figs-in-a-box, no arguing over Monopoly! Without Christmas’s malignant influence, I can carry on doing what rock stars do best – snorting coke off a whore’s arse before drowning in a bath of piss! Oh thank you cheerful spirit for showing me the excellent ways of my errors!”

And he hollered down to the boy,

“Say there lad? Would you care for this shiny sixpence I have in my hand?”

“Would I? You bet I bloody would sir!” cried the lad.

“Well whistle, you little shit! Whistle and get away from my fucking house while you’re about it!”

And with that Doherty slammed the window, got back into bed, and drank a bottle of Wild Turkey so fast it liquidised his kidneys on the spot.

Merry Christmas!  

I recently wrote this bugger for Classic Rock. Herr Rowley ummed and aaared about it, then rejected it hands down (because he despises me). Anyway, I thought it was alright and maybe you will too …

Waters Torture

Listening to four Roger Waters solo albums in a row isn’t something I’d heartily recommend. Indeed, I would argue that listening to four Roger Waters albums in a row is the least pleasure a listener can scrape from a musical experience outside of finding oneself kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to sit in the front row of a Cheeky Girls concert where they’re ‘trying out new material’. Listening to four Roger Waters albums in a row leaves you feeling bitter and resentful and ill-at-ease with your fellow man … in short, it makes you feel like Roger Waters.

So why, you may ask, did I subject myself to such misery?

An e-mail arrived from Sian Llewellyn asking my opinion on a list of ‘Must Hear’ Roger Waters tracks she was compiling for an upcoming issue. This intrigued me as I’d been under the impression that once Rog pulled up the drawbridge on The Wall, there was nothing much the miserable sod had produced that would fall into the category of ‘Must Hear’. In fact it struck me as a contradiction in terms akin to asking what were the ‘Must Hear’ tracks of Ultravox, or Spandau Ballet, or, God forbid, Simply Red. There weren’t any, surely?

But then I got a bee in my bonnet about the matter and resolved to listen again to the four proper Roger Waters solo albums to see if I’d missed something. Was there, in this musical Eeyore’s small canon of solo work, standout gems that would qualify for the vaunted title of ‘Must Hear Songs’?

My personal musical Kristallnacht began with The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, Roger’s first proper solo album after he left Pink Floyd. Pros And Cons is a concept album that tells the story of a man (Roger) asleep in his bed next to his wife but dreaming of getting his end away. This being a Roger Waters joint, his attempts to seduce his dream-female are thwarted by his own inadequacies and fears, as well as truck drivers, Arab terrorists and, of course, his wife. In the song 4:50 AM (Gone Fishing) Roger, who’s moved to Wyoming to try to start a new life with his wife on a farm that falls apart around his ears, explains one of the reasons for things going tits-up is that ‘the kids caught bronchitis’ – who else but the Sultan of Suffering could come up with a line like that? Superb. Other highlights of Pros And Cons are the standout 5:06 AM (Every Stranger’s Eyes) and one of my favourites 4:37 AM (Arabs With Knives And West German Skies) which includes a piece of jolly Bavarian accordion music played over Roger cackling in German and shows that even when he’s trying to be light-hearted the effect is downright sinister.

To be honest, it’s all a bit Wall-y. Indeed Roger, in what sounds slightly like an ultimatum, offered Pink Floyd the choice to either ‘do’ The Wall or Pros And Cons as their next album in 1978, which is like asking Poland who they would prefer to be invaded by – Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? That Floyd plumped for The Wall as the lesser of two evils says all you need to know about The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking.

Next up in my descent into someone else’s personal madness was 1986’s soundtrack album When The Wind Blows. The movie, which tells the heart-warming tale of an elderly British couple slowly rotting to death in potato sacks after a nuclear attack, is just the sort of material Roger was born to be involved with, and he gets to display his talents for musical gloomscapes on the album’s second side (the first side being a compilation of songs by the likes of Genesis, Squeeze and Bowie). It’s a mainly instrumental album but Roger still manages to shoehorn a snipe at big business and religion over their treatment of Israel in his vicious Towers Of Faith. The song has bugger-all to do with nuclear war (it did not appear in the movie) but is as fine an example of Roger’s howling hatred for God and the powers-that-be as anything he’s done post-Floyd.

After allowing a few moments to bandage my wrists, I ploughed into the monstrous 1987 concept album Radio KAOS. Radio KAOS suffers from that 80s curse that ruined so many albums of that troublesome decade – the synthesiser.
If I was pushed to give a description of Radio KAOS it would be this – imagine The Wall viciously raping Gary Newman and Gary Newman thus giving birth to a baby with the voice of Kraftwerk and the sunny disposition of Adolf Hitler. And then imagine it fucking your mother. In the ass.

Radio KAOS concerns itself with the story of Benny and his twin brother Billy. Billy is disabled, receives radio waves in his head and uses synthesisers and cordless telephones to communicate (he sounds like a sort of Smurf Stephen Hawkins). After his twin is imprisoned for stealing the aforementioned phone, Billy moves to LA and befriends a DJ who works for a local radio station that only plays Roger Waters songs. After learning to bend electronics to his will our hero, outraged at the actions of the politicians blah blah blah uses his new-found powers to launch a nuclear strike to shake things up a bit. Roger tells us this a good thing in one of the album’s smattering of decent songs – The Tide Is Turning. Roger addresses this final song to Sylvester Stallone. As you do.

As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not Radio KAOS’s biggest fan. I don’t care for synthesiser music and I’m not enamoured with albums that contain this much speech … if I was in the mood for that sort of thing I’d listen to Jeff Wayne’s humdinger War Of The Worlds. And then I’d hang myself.

The finishing line was in sight as 1992’s Amused To Death was dumped unenthusiastically into the CD player. To be honest, I’d had my fill of Roger and his demons by this stage and this Eurythmics-sounding diatribe against absolutely everyone in the world pushed me over the edge into spitting, venomous fury. The premise of Amused To Death is that we are all feckless morons drowning in a sea of drivel spoon-fed us by the world’s media to keep us distracted from all the shit that’s really going on in the world. Our obsession with this infantile putrescence will one day kill us all. We will, literally, be Amused To Death. You dig?

Well I don’t know about you but I don’t need my idiocy pointed out by a war obsessed misery-guts who’s spent the last thirty-odd years standing outside the tent pissing in. I’d had enough of this wander through Misanthropy Meadows and, bellowing vengeance on this blackguard for ruining my night and causing me to miss Dragon’s Den, I turned off the CD player and stormed off, in a huff, to bed. I’d achieved nothing but to identify exactly the same tracks that Sian, thousands of years ago, had asked me about as ‘Must Hear’ songs. This made the whole exercise a pointless waste of time and left me feeling bitter and resentful and ill-at-ease with my fellow man … in short, I felt just like that bastard Roger Waters.

After almost six long months of writing random words and pictures to entertain a man in the Midlands, I today announce I’m bringing the curtain down on In Through The Out Door But Then Back In Again II. I need to move on, I need to grow, I need, most importantly of all, to try flogging you shit … so welcome, my friends, to In Through The Out Door But Then Back In Again III

I’m often asked how we solve the problem of the country’s growing teenage gang culture. “Why, easily!” is my stock answer, “Throw ‘em in a trench and dissolve ‘em all with potassium and quick-lime!” Apparently this is ‘inhumane’ according to the politically correct mob, so here are a few other suggestions that won’t see me brought before the Nuremberg beak for supposed ‘crimes against humanity’ …

Happy Slap ‘Em Back

Why not? Teenagers would soon get the idea this sort of random infliction of violence isn’t much fun when the shoe’s on the other foot. I propose councils set up a network of licenced happy-slapping patrols that will trawl shopping precincts, public parks and the back of Tesco’s looking for teenagers. When they find them hanging around being anti-social, they can slap ‘em around until they’re half-dead while filming the whole shebang on their mobiles. As well of stopping kids whacking citizens about for no reason, it would have the added advantage of giving off-duty nightclub bouncers something to do other than eating bananas and being involved in low-level organised crime.

Make Them Swallow Rabbit Shit Preventatively

On a child’s thirteenth birthday, he or she should be forced to swallow a pound of rabbit shit. Once the punishment has been administered the father – for this is man’s work – should tell the child “There’ll be plenty more where that came from” if he or she strays from the path of righteousness. Later, when a child enters the choppy waters of full-blown adolescence, any infraction from ‘Lack Of Respect’ to ‘Stabbing A Headmaster In The Face With An Ice-Axe’ could be met with the administering of another pound’s worth of rabbit shit. This is the sort of punishment former miscreants will chuckle over in later life as they, too, force rabbit shit down their own children’s throats while saying it never did THEM any harm.

White Dog Shit Walkabout

Slightly less harsh than forcing small children to eat rabbit shit is White Dog Shit Walkabout. Any teenager found guilty of stealing cars, beating up old ladies, or posting photos of his balls on Flickr is banished to the wilderness in a loin-cloth with a big spear. He is told not to come back until he has hunted down and trapped a lump of white dog shit (Crappus Elusivus Canis), a sight now so rare in Britain that children born after 1987 think it an urban legend. To stop him simply joining another family, or painting brown dog shit white, his face should be branded with the legend “I AM HUNTING FOR WHITE DOG SHIT AS PUNISHMENT FOR BEING A DISGRACE TO MY FAMILY” and his hands should be removed from the end of his arms. I understand this could hurt a bit.

Three Tit Loudspeaker Nose-Bollock Bladder-Sign Public Humiliation Extraordinaire

We all know how annoyingly shy and embarrassed teenage girls get. Well imagine how bloody awful they’d feel if, after committing some minor crime, they had an extra tit glued on in between the other two, a loudspeaker nailed to one hand announcing “I’M FAT! I’M FAT! I’M FAT!” over and over ad infitum, a pair of horse’s balls sellotaped to the end of their nose, and a sign glued to the other hand that read “CHRIST I NEED A PISS!”. Try hiding behind your hand with that lot hanging off you, you disrespectful little madam! I guarantee that, were this punishment to be implicated, crime committed by teenage girls would drop by 100%.

Throw Them In A Trench And Dissolve Them All With Potassium And Quick-Lime

I still reckon this one’s got wings.

Here’s a little something I cobbled together quickly for the Illustration Friday subject ‘Signs’.

(Click image to enlarge)

We would like to respond to you recent e-mail. We had no intention of offending you or your ideas. However, in light of the enormous number of ideas, concepts, and materials that Mattel develops in-house and that are suggested to it by third parties, it’s likely that the ideas, concepts, and/or materials that you submitted to us embody ideas, concepts, and/or materials that are identical or substantially similar to those that, in the past, were developed by our staff or submitted to us by third parties. Likewise, in the future, we may without any reference to your unsolicited submission, develop or receive from third parties ideas, concepts, and materials that are identical or substantially similar to those submitted by you.

Since Mattel doesn’t retain or review any submissions, any similarities that may exist between any submissions and any product from Mattel or any Mattel company are purely coincidental. Please note that Mattel doesn’t assume any obligation in connection with unsolicited submissions, including any obligation to keep it confidential and any obligation to notify anyone whether their ideas, concepts, or materials are identical or substantially similar to those that are developed by or submitted to Mattel.

We would like to reiterate, to solicit interest for your submission, you may want to establish a relationship with a professional design house or a broker that specializes in licensing or developing products for consumer products companies. For a list of such professionals, and for other information that you may find helpful, you may wish to contact the Toy Industry Association, at 212.675.1141, or www.Toy-Tia.org.

We recognize that your submission is an expression of your confidence in Mattel’s ability to successfully develop and market new products, and we appreciate your interest in Mattel. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors and apologize for any disappointment this may have caused.

Sincerely,

Mattel Consumer Relations Department

Notice any similarities? Well, I’m buggered if I’ll lie down and take this without a fight! My response …

Dear Mr Mattel

I grudgingly thank you for your response to my last e-mail. I say ‘grudgingly’ because I can’t bring myself to be fully grateful for receiving exactly the same e-mail from you as before, but with the sentences ‘We would like to respond to you (sic) recent e-mail’ and ‘We had no intention of offending you or your ideas’ tacked on to the beginning. Indeed, seeing as your last e-mail outlining how you have no hesitation in pilfering the ideas of honest toy designers was what got me so worked up in the first place, I can only assume you didn’t bother to read my previous correspondence past the first line – if you had, you might not have been so insensitive as to repeat the stuff that got my goat to begin with.

I repeat – Saying you might, at some point in the future, develop a psychologically-deranged, armed-to-the-teeth, bullet-riddled African lion toy, and THEN pass the whole thing off as a coincidence is absurd. I sent you the plans, I get the glory – that’s how it works in my world.

Aslan In Vietnam is mine! The idea of a haunted lion packing heat in the theatre of war is mine! Any variation on a Christ-like, Rambo-esque, locked, loaded, and ready to rumble King of the Jungle for kids (well … not girls) is mine! Don’t think you can bring out some bloody imitation – Simba at The Battle of the Bulge or Parsley’s Korea for instance – and get away with it as a mere coincidence! Anything even vaguely resembling such a product (and that includes tigers before you start getting ideas) would be met with the full force of the law, don’t you worry about that!

Good God! Was this how it was for Barnes-Wallis? Did he come up with the bouncing bomb only to walk past a shop three years later and see his invention re-labelled ‘The Boinging Bombo’? Well? There’s no wonder inventors are all on the dole if major corporations such as yourselves would rather steal their ideas instead of paying folk their due. I thought we lived in a world of honour sir? Apparently we live in one where the big boys think nothing of disco-dancing all the way to the bank after trampling over the genius of others.

Shame on you!

Yours, disgusted

B P Perry

The world is full of jackals!

Am I correct in thinking that under the government’s anti-discrimination laws you cannot refuse my applying for the position of mid-fielder without being accused of sexism, racism, ageism and unsuitabilityism? I don’t think you can, and therefore compel you, on threat of a court injunction, to consider me for the position the next time it comes up.

I am a fat, old, stringently anti-communist, Chinese woman who came to Britain in 1948 to escape that rat bastard Chairman Mao’s death squads. I have done nothing since except prostitute my body out for money. Sadly, as I’ve dried up, the money’s dried up, and this is the reason I need to become a well-paid Premiership footballer. I’ve bills to pay and now I’ve sold anything half-decent to those thieving bastards at Cash Converters, it’s top-flight football or having my fingers crushed in a vice to pay the debts I owe to a disagreeable gentleman called Alan Cope and his brother Ollie.

I reckon I’d do alright being a footballer. I’ve seen the game three times on my television when I couldn’t find the remote control under the mountain of litter in my house, and believe I could take a pretty good stab at the rules. I have noticed there seems to be a lot of running around however, and would ask that, if you were to give me the job, I could be allowed a nice sit down, a cup of tea, and a biscuit about every five minutes or so. I’m not so smart on my legs these days ever since Alan Cope broke my thigh bones with a meat tenderiser after I failed to pay him back the money I borrowed to buy an electric guitar I hoped to use when I applied to join Deep Purple. I certainly couldn’t take ninety minutes running around with those young bucks of yours – I’d probably suffer a complete rectal prolapse!

Thank you for considering me for the position of mid-field professional footballer and I look forward to hearing from you soon. In the meantime, can you advance me a sub of two thousand pounds or so? Alan’s an impatient man and won’t wait forever to get to work on these fingers of mine.

Yours truly

Bing Ping Perri

A nice surprise this morning. Instead of the usual barrage of junk mail, kebab-shop leaflets, charity begging letters and further correspondence concerning my ongoing war with Virgin Media, I received all of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s albums, courtesy of Herr Rowley and the good people at EMI. I actually own them all already, but not with all the new whistles ‘n’ bells that these re-issues contain. Finally I’ve got my grubby paws on such oddities as I Love To Bumpity Bump, When Yuba Played The Rhumba On The Tuba Down In Cuba, and Sofa Head. I’m as pleased as a pig dipped in shit.

Merci, Herr Rowley.