Monday 23 March 2009

2008 Summarised for Future London Underground magazine

It’s almost new year, AGAIN. Only one more year of the noughtys. Bloody hell. I’m going to get old soon and my tentacles are going to start to shrivel. I better start praying or something.

New year is when my superstitious streak really comes to the fore. Usually it is solely channelled into picking up pennies from the street because some-one once told me ‘See a Penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck’ (although I do this with something akin to fundamentalist zeal, and may the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster pity the poor old granny who gets in between me and that shiney coin in the gutter…). At this time of the year, though, all the good intentions, forward looking, and reflection gets me all existentially hot under the collar, horny for prevarication. You see, I’m too cynical and twisted to be an optimist so instead I turn to superstition.

Last year a friend, who I will call H, told me that what ever you do on Hogmanay will prophesise how you will spend the whole year to come. OK, so she also once told me that the Tsunami was mother-nature’s way of claiming back some of the 80% water with which humans are composed, and that drinking your own urine is good for you, but this really snared my imagination. I subscribed to the gospel of H. I just skimmed over the jarring bits about tsunamis and pee because the idea that a single day could pre-determine a whole year was just too good. I started concocting lucid fantasies of creeping into Wembley stadium on new years eve with my guitar and a PA and jamming all night with all my best pals and an entourage of hired strippers, or filling my bath tub with my life savings and rolling around in them all night long in the nude with a kidnapped Pussycat Doll. Clearly these could only preface a year of unprecedented success and good fortune, or perhaps prison.

As it happened I spent new year 2007-2008 like everybody else, pissed out my skull at my mates house party. I did, however, manage to jam in the bells with a live guitar rendition of Auld Lang Syne as well as cram in a clandestine, deviant shag with my girlfriend on said mate’s couch (shit, I hope he’s not reading this, actually, he’d love it really, I should be more worried about her). ‘Great!’, I thought when I emerged from the fog of hangover sometime on the afternoon of January 1st with the help of a Bagel on Brick Lane, a classic year of music and deviant sex was surely mine.

2008 has indeed been a massive year for me, and filled brimful with music. I’ve put together 2 bands, Surprise! and Bronze Medallists, done hundreds of gigs, produced several EPs, got a song on a TV ad, promoted fantastic music across London and even put on a guerrilla music festival. Olly the Octopus has a life of it’s own now too, my music videos and stunts have blossomed into a minor You Tube phenomenon, rivalling for sheer popularity ‘my cat fell behind the sofa’ and ‘my camcorder footage of Lindsay Lohan on the red carpet at a premiere’. I get asked to travel up and down the country to make liberals chuckle with self-important condescension and repressed types wince with unease and, I hope, just a little psycho-sexuality, and occasionally I even get asked to write the odd column for a fanzine! It really was a great year and the first of my life when I could rightfully claim what I had told girls for years, that I made my living from music baby.

So the gospel of H has already done something in it’s first year that none of the world’s other major religions have managed in several millennia, it has passed the test of empirical scrutiny, I am living proof. A new religion is birthed, and I heartily recommend the teachings. I fully intend to beckon in 2009 in a bath of money in Wembley stadium and I encourage you to join me. ‘Wait!’, I hear you cry, ‘What about the deviant sex with your girl friend bit? Did that work too?’. Well, we broke up in March, but if you don’t mention that I wont mention Leviticus.

For more teachings from the great Octopus visit

http://www.myspace.com/ollytheoctopus

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