Even in the age of endless “internet phenomenons”, Mouse Trumpet might just be the strangest band in the world. Well, today, at least. With an aversion to having their songs heard, their faces photographed or their members even named, it’s hard to work out how they intend to achieve their stated aim of being “the biggest underground band ever”. Not that asking them yields any solid answers either.

They are, as far as I can tell, a trio from Scotland, whose music sits somewhere between Section 25 and Chic – or at least, that’s the legend. They described their own music as “Experimental Rhythm Swamp-Twee” but have no music available to listen to anywhere.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to prove or verify anything.

Their method of ‘promotion’ thus far has been like a game of word-of-mouth pass-the-parcel. All three of their gigs have been invite-only affairs, performed in private houses, at which, reputedly, all audience members (average attendance: 6) had to surrender their phones and any other potential recording equipment, including cameras, at the door.

Despite repeated requests from the band for no critical responses to these gigs, one or two excitable ‘reviews’ have turned up on internet forums. One attendee at their first gig, last October, claimed (during a burst of hyperbole) that the band would be “huge”, sound “a bit Section 25”, and that their song ‘Elephant Solo’ was “the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. About ten minutes of heavy bass, screeching guitar and a kazoo”.

Their most recent gig was well received by one commentator who said that a song called ‘Spa Spa’ “might be the best thing Nile Rogers never did”.

As intriguing as these whispers are to me, it may not sound promising to anyone else. ‘Nebulous’ appears to be the band’s motto – if not ‘lazy’. My initial enquiries for information about the band proved fruitless until last week, when an email turned up agreeing to a short interview. I haven’t established if this was an exclusive but my hopes were high. It was, of course, conducted via email – and specifically “not via chat”, as I’d hoped. My questionnaire was completed, it said on the band email, by their vocalist, Jay Dark.

I asked roughly twice as many questions as this but many were left blank. So here is, in all its glory, my interview with Mouse Trumpet:

Why all the mystery surrounding Mouse Trumpet – isn’t it  just a pop group?

There is no mystery. We are a pop group.

You describe yourselves as “the biggest underground band ever” – is this a prediction? If so, how does it work?

No, it’s a joke. Not our joke, though.

Your musical style, “Experimental Rhythm Swamp-Twee” – where does that come from?

Self-explanatory.  Music you feel, not hear.

Where exactly are you from?

Anywhere. People get too bogged down in notions of belonging. We’re against that. (N.B. All their gigs to date have taken place in Scotland.)

What musical influences do the band own up to?

It’s hard to say. I have no records, just what’s inside my head. We’re motivated by rhythm but it’s not always about that.

Your gigs are private, invite-only events – why is this?

Too many bands lose control too early. Gigs are stale, they’re not events. We want to do something else. It’s important to know where we’re playing and to whom.

I see from your Facebook page that you’re releasing an E.P. soon – how do you intend to promote it?

It’s not coming out. Our intention was to release it in written format only, as sheet music, to surprise people and play with their expectations. Even that is difficult, and costly. But the songs are ours and they’re not fully grown yet. It’s difficult to sum them up in the context of a recording or a page, so they’re staying on our laptops for now.

The track Evil Cat Lover sounds intriguing – what’s it about?

Self-explanatory.

You’ve demoed over an album’s worth of material. Where do you see yourselves in a year’s time, developmentally?

We heard a song about a cassette someone found in their back garden. We like that idea.

Despite the onset of adulthood, I’m still one of those people who squirms, then chortles or sucks through his teeth whenever a TV continuity announcer says that the following programme “contains sexual scenes from the start”.   I do wish Steve McQueen’s new film Shame came with one of those as a preface.  Or maybe, in my case, a warning that “those of a squeamish or sensitive disposition should perhaps look away for the next 101 minutes”.

For all that it’s called Shame, it shows little abashment when laying out, as starkly as is legal, the full, squalid horror of sex addiction.  It takes its subject very seriously indeed, thrusting it in front of your eyes and making you watch every grunt and grimace – the camera rarely averts its gaze.  Yet, even with a high number of stickily realistic sex scenes, Shame still manages to be a resolutely unsexy film.  McQueen’s crowning achievement has been to make sex addiction look as repellent onscreen as heroin addiction.  It’s harrowing stuff.

The Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, the addict in question.  Other than his work as some kind of successful corporate office drone in New York, his addiction consumes most of his life.  He lives alone in a small apartment, with live sex shows on his laptop, cupboards full of hardcore pornographic magazines, and the knowledge that even his computer in work is full of the stuff.  The extent of his addiction means that his life is a succession of advances towards women in bars, in clubs and even on the Subway; or, failing a free hit, he can always employ a prostitute or two.  In fact, it’s so acute that even after a conquest, he still has to masturbate at home and in the toilets at work.

It’s all incredibly unsettling.  The torrent of emotionless sex scenes becomes increasingly difficult and discomforting to watch.  With McQueen’s camera so deliberately intrusive, it becomes the most upsetting voyeuristic experience.  But this is what also makes it brilliant. Under such scrutiny, an actor must be 100% believable and Fassbender is simply astonishing at making this character live.  It’s early in the year but already this looks like a multi-award winning performance.  Brandon’s tendency to wander around his apartment nude even suggests Fassbender’s penis may end up with its own IMDb page.

I remember a detail from the blurb for Driller Killer which claimed that “a steel stomach is required to watch the final scenes of mayhem”.  Well, when Brandon goes on a climactic night of binge sex, first to a seedy bar, then to an even seedier club and finally to a private room with two prostitutes, it was a good test of my own constitution.  I found myself flinching, cowering and wishing for these extended scenes of graphic compulsion to end.

Fortunately, there is respite in amongst all this.  Carey Mulligan turns in a brilliant performance as Brandon’s needy and tragic sister Sissy, a singer hoping to make it big in New York but, despite a show-stopping piano rendition of New York, New York, looking hopelessly doomed from the start.  And Nicole Beharie is also superb as Marianne, a work colleague who provides Brandon’s only flicker of potential romance and redemption.

But I left the cinema feeling genuinely shocked by Shame.  Is this because I am a natural prude, or is it simply that Steve McQueen has managed to make something close to a horror film about horrible sex?   It could be a mixture of both.  On one hand, it’s a very good, very important film about a controversial subject that needed to be tackled; on the other, I know I never want to see it again.

…the more they turn into The Village Green Preservation Society.

God Save Strawberry Jam.

Like anyone of an age, I’m very sorry to hear of the passing of former Blockbusters host, Bob Holness.  His show was essential tea-time viewing for me in the mid 1980s, being a quiz with questions I had a reasonable chance of answering correctly. Not that I was ever brave enough to apply to take part, mind you, but I did think the prizes were rather excellent. Bob was as gentlemanly and respectable a host as you could have, and in his banter with contestants and ability to cut out any nonsense showed he was a savvy choice for both the concept of the show and its time slot.   Blockbusters was always a slightly odd quiz, in that it tested the theory that two heads were better than one. So, with two contestants up against a solo one, it was always nice to see the solo ones doing well and reaching one or more Gold Runs, where all the prizes were to be won.

Bob was perhaps a little like a doddery uncle at times, but his often awkward smalltalk with contestants was all part of his charm.  It also led to some great comic moments, over and above the ubiquitous “I’ll have a ‘p’ please, Bob”. 

One pair of lads, who had completed all their Gold Runs, won a round-the-world trip as a prize. They returned on a Champions series of the show to tell Bob all about it, including how they met a couple of girls who were on a similar route. In all avuncular innocence, Bob asked: “And did they go all the way with you?” – to much sniggering from the young audience.

Blockbusters was also where I clapped eyes on a contestant called Julie Thorp (sorry if you happen across this post, Julie).  The 15-year-old me developed an enormous crush on her (‘oh, beauty and brains,’ quipped my Uncle Ian), so much so that I wrote an excruciating song about her called, er, Julie Thorp.  I think the lyrics mentioned something about her charms “crystallizing into shards of sepulchral majesty” – clearly I was channelling Fish from Marillion at the time.  Another teenage artifact I have to ensure is kept under wraps.

In the 1990s, I thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s charming stint on the equally charming Call My Bluff, with team captains Sandi Toksvig and the late Alan Coren – these were the days when I would bunk off writing to have a long early lunch, which sometimes went on to take in Fifteen To One and Countdown too.

I never once believed the bizarre urban myth that Bob played the saxophone on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street but if he had done it, he would have been every bit as charming as he always came across as on television.

R.I.P. Bob.  I will miss you.

     ‘Mum, the milk’s sour’ I complained. 

     ‘I should hope so,’ she said.  ‘It’s been maturing in the cupboard for a week.’

     There was a break for the adverts in TV AM, so Bill picked up his giant Herald, and began laughing like an executive, pretending he understood the articles.  ‘Hmm,’ he said.  ‘I see things are dicey in Lebanon.’

     ‘How do you mean “dicey”?’ I asked.

     He coughed, as he turned the page.  ‘You know, like wee cubes.’

     It was then I decided to leave home.  Within ten minutes I had packed a case and left through the back door via the kitchen.  Neither of my parents appeared to notice me leaving.

So began Never Kill Farmers, my juvenile foray into novel writing.  I like to call it ‘my first novel’, because I believe you should always have a couple of crap attempts at long fiction under your belt before trying to get anyone to take you seriously.  It took me approximately three weeks to write, came in at around 25,000 words and, despite its promising start, was complete and utter rubbish.

In the spirit of my new year resolution to write more fiction, I sought this out in a box of teenage memories, mainly musical ones.  It did stir a little school-related nostalgia in me but that was as far as the enjoyment went.  I did little else but flick through the pages, stopping at parts that seemed potentially interesting, only to discover that it was the excruciating work of a frustrated, virginal 15-year-old.  Why I wrote it, I have no idea – perhaps I had an excess of half-ideas I needed to use up.

The “plot” is simple enough:

The protagonist, Timmy, leaves home, is kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity and ends up at a hostelry run by Archibald, a crazed fan of reclusive English poet, John Vernon Smith.  Agreeing to help locate the poet (despite persistent rumours he is dead), the pair travel across Europe picking up clues as to Smith’s whereabouts, Archibald reciting his awful poetry at every opportunity.  They narrowly avoid death several times, via run-ins with a vampiric school teacher, alleged aliens invading a convenience store, a consignment of poisoned sausage rolls and a stormy journey in a fishing vessel run by a delusional sailor who calls himself Captain Kirk.  Eventually, they locate J.V Smith in a home for the criminally insane, and help him to escape, only to discover ‘he’ is actually six different people, all of whom are serial killers.  The ending is distinctly unsatisfactory and can’t be repeated here, save for the “revelation” that, in the likely ensuing slaughter, farmers were to be spared.

The reason it is called Never Kill Farmers is because of that cover illustration – a clear case for always judging a book by its cover.  I copied it from an original drawing by my then geography teacher Miss Irving.  She had used it to help illustrate “The Factors That Influence Farming” on her overhead projector.  Typically, I decided to lop the farmer’s head off with a scythe, leading to a rush of “inspiration”.

I should say that, despite this substandard fantasy adventure, I was generally rather good at writing fiction in school, usually receiving excellent marks and impressing my English teachers. It is probably just as well they didn’t get to see Never Kill Farmers - no one else will either.

Call me an old grump (everybody else does), but I’m hugely disappointed that Michael Kiwanuka has come top of the BBC Sound of 2012 poll.  No harm to the boy at all, as he owns a very fine collection of cardigans and jumpers, but his current song Home Again is already a front runner for my most hated record of 2012.  I can’t get to the radio quickly enough to switch it off whenever I hear that delicately picked intro, just so I don’t get to the first foggy-moan of vocal.

Morning presenters on the normally marvellous BBC 6 Music seem to love it (or at least they pretend to) but to me (and those in my vicinity) it’s a vastly unwelcome reminder of dreary, plaintive, pseudo-poetic whiners of the recent past – imagine a computer programme that could meld David Gray, Daniel Powter, James Blunt and the bloke from the Wimax advert into one, and that’s Kiwanuka’s Home Again.  Bilge.

So, another fail for the Sound Of… series?  If this list is truly made up by ‘tastemakers’, then they’re obviously determined to keep us all in the same doldrums we’ve been suffering since they recommended the Coldplay-lite(r) Keane to us back in 2004.   Ellie Goulding?  Corinne Bailey Rae?  Mika??  Why is 21st century ‘taste’ so… distasteful?  If it’s just a prediction of what might be big, fair enough.  If it’s a conspiracy to get us to buy rubbish like Duffy (2008′s runner up), then the whole thing is nonsense.

But to tell us that these buffoons (whoever they are) are ‘tastemakers’ sends us all a terrible warning about the future of pop.  It’s bad enough that a whole generation of music writers started life thinking Boyzone was exciting teenybop fare but this relentless sludge of down-tempo, middle-of-the-road, cod-soulful dinner party muzak we’ve been forced to endure since the late 1990s surely to God has had its day.  No?

Anyway, to help make your own mind up, here’s one of Kiwanuka’s biggest influences in uptempo mode.

Sorry for talking shit yet again, and I know I really should be writing this in a letter to the Southside People or the Daily Mail, but I’ve noticed that there’s a nice new North and South Dublin divide when dealing with dog turds.

On East Wall on the North side, the pavements are, in some lights, gold but mainly brown, with a heavy and regularly replenished covering of dog mess.  Some dog turds have been there for many years.  If (and this will never happen) there’s some sort of restoration/modernisation of East Wall in future, there may be some environmentalist protests at the destruction of historical dog shit, some of which dates back to pre-boom times.

Meanwhile, on the South side, things are a lot more tasteful.  Dog owners are apparently happy to scrape their mutts’ crap off the pavement and place them in polythene bags – but these bags of jobbies are not the sort of accessory you’d pair with a Louis Vuitton handbag, Prada sunglasses or even a giant skinny mocha latte.  No, what you do is wait until the coast is clear then discreetly drop or fling the offending article as if it had never belonged to you in the first place.

So many of these bags are mysteriously appearing dotted around the Foxrock area overnight, they’re becoming known as ‘Plop Circles’.  (I made that up.)

So, while I’m directing this at these dog owners who flung dung, I’m also addressing local councillors to ask why on earth there aren’t any dedicated dog waste bins around south side public parks?  Mind you, it’s task enough finding a regular bin anywhere outside of the city centre – maybe local councils are happy to be masters of middens.

Help could be at hand, but, naturally, you have to pay for it yourself.  I’ve just spotted this product online – so at least you’ll know what they are if you ever see anybody carrying one.

Fourth in a “series” of short tributes to well-known people called Jeremy

There was a short period of time when Jeremy Healy was a hero of mine.  Back in 1982, before I really knew what clothes were for, I was smitten by a pair of musical designer tramps called Haysi Fantayzee, featuring Jeremy ‘Jeremiah’ Healy and the lovely Kate Garner. I’d never seen donkey jackets look cool on anyone, even Michael Foot, so it was rather a surprise to see these two leaping around on Top of the Pops, strutting a ‘style’ that looked, for about thirty seconds, like it might catch on.  Apart from hits like John Wayne Is Big Leggy and Shiny Shiny, they were famed for this scruffy appearance, their saucy utterings and their penchant for drawing designs on their clothes and footwear using silver and gold felt tip pens.  Heroic!

Naturally, as a starry-eyed rural teenager, I wanted to copy their ‘star style’, and so bought a pair of giant brown jumbo-corduroy trousers and a tweed cap, thinking that the rest of the image would fall into place.  I’d turn up to house parties and try to dance to everything in the style of my new-found idols.  I even went on a day trip to the Isle of Cumbrae dressed this way, hoping the islanders would think I was some kind of mainland trendy.  But it didn’t work.  For one thing, my mum wouldn’t allow me to grow my hair, or tie things to it (thanks, Mum), nor would she allow me to take felt tip pens to my boots.

It was all academic in any case; Haysi didn’t last, their fourth single Sister Friction was fine by me (it had a huge fold out poster with it!) but wasn’t a hit and that, as they say, was that.  I actually joined their fanclub, the only one I ever joined.  I still have my membership card, bearing a photo of me taken at school in 1983.  Awful, of course.

But let’s fast-forward to 1993, when Jeremy had become a proto-superstar DJ.  He wandered into the record shop I worked in and came to the counter with a Michael Jackson 12″.  I was all ready to say hello, tell him I’d been a fan, and all those things but it became clear he was in a grump.  I said to him, very politely: “That’s £3.99, please.”  He scowled at me and grunted: “Wot, four quid?”

And that was that.  After years of him being one of my heroes (I even bought his Bonaventura single When Malindy Sings on 12″!!!), it all fizzled out in that moment.  I know he’s probably not a grump all the time, but that was the only time this former Haysi fan ever would ever meet him.  You only get one chance to make a first impression.

I wonder what he said about me?  Anyway…

The mix of influences is widespread: it merrily flits across electro-pop, jazz and several dance genres, like trip-hop, trance, chill, drum n’ bass – but it’s all done with restraint, none of these is allowed to overwhelm the atmosphere.   The use of singer Elaine Dowling is the cherry on the cake.  Her vocals are smooth and vivid, and she sounds both intense and aloof almost simultaneously. The songs themselves (alongside a couple of instrumentals) are deep, complex and very well produced.  It bears consecutive and repeated listens.  I was particularly impressed by the tracks Weapon Of Choice, Lou Laurita and Both Sides Of The Gun but it’s a genuinely accomplished debut overall.  I love it.

Dearie me, it’s 2012.

The world is in the grip of death, famine, financial collapse, and, despite the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, there are still a significant number of lunatics running the global asylum.  The New Year arrives with violent storms battering the coasts of Britain and Ireland.  Even David Bowie is about to turn 65.  All we can really do is hope for the best.

This year, I’m hoping to continue where 1997 left off, creatively-speaking.  Let’s call it a ‘creative spring’.  I wrote an awful more in 2011 than I even managed in 1997 (when I took a – ahem – ‘career break’ to write a novel), so here’s to new horizons, finding silver linings in the blanket of dark clouds and, like the Wombles always said, making good use of the things I find.

Here’s to everyone who bothers to look beyond the jump – may your God go with you.