You pop the tape in your sweet Marantz twin-decker and crank "Spine of God" for the sixty-eight thousandth time. All your super-tight bros from way back when have come over with frosty brews and Brads' cousin Jay just dropped off a freshly manicured ounce of the filthy. Take a load off, bro. You've earned it.

Before I weave this yarn of open battle on the little island, a retraction.
Last couple of posts I made repeated mention of meeting Mathilda Backlund. What a fuckhead. I've never met that woman. No, the bright young star I met was Tilde Evelina. A zillion apologies to both parties. I've gone back and amended the posts.

Now I've made my feelings about the greasy, cinder block gem that is The Windmill, Brixton,  clear to all on a previous occasion, so I won't waste space heaping praise on the staff, the Bong Cave out the back, the crippled eccentrics in the afternoon crowd or the big goofy dogs (huge fucking dogs!).

I'll just take that shit as read and tell ye a tale of terror (*shines torch up underneath face*).
It starts over breakfast in Aarons depressing shoebox in Dalston, as the eerily docile Von Cupples dips his toast soldiers in his boiled eggy weggy. Aaron looks over with a blood freezingly innocent stare and asks me if I slept okay. I start trembling uncontrollably, my egg spoon dropping from nerveless fingers to clang on the table like a tiny Hells' Bell.

You'd be nervous too, if a state registered sociopath laid this creepy look on you over his egg-cup.

But gee whiz. The moment passes, and the new Aaron wanders over to his desk to do some psycho-therapy on the box, which had suffered a personal meltdown the previous night and fucked our gig in Camden.  My own feeling was that The Box was just grandstanding, faking a breakdown to draw sympathy and media coverage, but Dr Von Cupples  appeared to be able to coax it out of it's funk and the dead channels sputtered back to life, timidly at first, then stronger.

It's just a pathetic attention grab, Aaron. We should just ignore it until it stops being a SHIT.

With The Box in better spirits, we retired to separate rooms and spent the afternoon skypeing dirty limericks to each-other. It gave me time to reflect solemnly on my latest sojourn in the City on the Thames.

This is my thinking face. It drives the chicks NUTS!

Has it been worthwhile? Yes, it has. Is London a sprawling, manic pile of nervous, queasy fun? Yes, it is. Do I miss the Lady Alexandra Cecile Bouche, my 6'2" French stoner super-model girl-bro? Only every second of the long dark night.

It's mixed bag, but there's more peanuts than shit, if you get my drift.

Jesus. What the fuck am I saying now?
Never mind all that, the point is I was living in a fools paradise, totally unprepared for the vicious, screeching left turn that the evening had in store. You see, in between composing bawdy rhymes, Aaron was speeding towards total mastery of The Cube. By my reckoning, his understanding of the Rubikoid mysteries hit critical mass around 6pm, right before we loaded up the Landcruiser to head off to soundcheck.

Something happened deep inside The Baarons mind when he realised that The Cube could be conquered by a mortal intellect. I noticed during the drive to Brixton that there was a struggle going on inside him. He drove in silence and his face was a blank sheet, but every so often he would let out a sharp, high skwawk and jerk his whole body as if someone was poking him in the back with a soldering iron.

Once at The Windmill, I hustled him to unload and set up on stage as fast as possible, hoping to occupy his mind. But there was something about Billy (the super nice guy running the sound-system) that caught his attention in a bad way. He just stood in front of his amp like a statue of hate and stared at this poor guy for at least 5 minutes while playing diminished E chords at painfull volume.

I thought I'd try to distract him by taking his picture (Aaron usually finds camera flashes fascinating), so as a result I caught this image of his death-stare just moments before he launched himself like a pale, skinny torpedo right over the top of the mixing desk.

Portrait of the tense seconds before Baron Von Cupples takes to the air.

The "fight" was over before it began. Aaron hit Billy at head height and slammed him back into the edge of the bar. Billys' head was jerked backwards at an impossible angle and hit the counter with a sickeningly loud crack, like a huge walnut in a vice, while Aaron sailed over the bar and rolled into a stack of Carlsberg crates. The degenerate, beer-drunk locals that were scattered around the pub started cheering wildly and stamping their feet as Billy crumpled to the floor and Tim (the booker) and I jumped on top of Aaron to pin his arms before he could stand up.

It was a rotten, rotten way to start the night, but fortunately it was also the apex of the violence. Billy was miraculously unharmed and after stretching a bad kink out of his neck he declared himself okay. He seemed perversely amused by the whole incident and grinned goofily as we lifted Aaron off the floor. Aaron had twisted his ankle pretty badly and the pain seemed to have a soothing effect. He apologised to Billy for being "a bit over the top" and a nervous calm settled over the room.

After that, the evening followed pretty standard lines for a Sunday night gig in a small, nuts-n-bolts rock dive. To whit...
Beer, beer, yack, yack, beer, yack, play, yack, beer. Everyone we knew was there (like, uh, Andy and Matt and Yasmine and Michelle) and the atmosphere was cool and breezy.

Our passionate, precise, jaw-droppingly powerfull set culminated in a rare live performance of  "Stacks On", a performance which was imediately declared "a pivotal moment in the pop history of the new millenium" by this Turkish guy in a Melvins shirt who passed out in the womens toilet and shat his pants. He was unconscious in there for about 40 minutes and no-one wanted to touch him, the reek was so horrible, but eventually two of his buddies dragged him out onto the street, where he woke up and started crying.

Hot damn. Is this a great band or WHAT!?

Here's Aaron post-gig, daring you to fuck with him, while some office-geek in a polo shirt tries to steal the limelight.

In a nice twist, Sara Motherfuckin Shakarchi dropped by for a nitecap, and even let me touch her, which of course kept me awake all night.

 Look at the twisted, moronic grin on my face. I am a fool for Mesopotamian royalty.

To conclude, I never did recover all my marbles after the ugly scenes at the start of the night, so I remained on edge until well after we'd packed the car and said farewell to Tim and his no-good cronies. But overall it was a grand gig, despite the violence and the stench of human waste, so I'm going to put it in the "Wins" column.

Thanks to Billy for a fine mix and his good humor in the face of random assault, and of course to Tim and the rest of the staff for being excellent humans. I'm back in Barcelona now,  to work on my Autumnal tan, and there's no gigs planned until the end of October, so the blog pickings could get pretty slim.

So while we're apart, eat well, be kind to people, take some excercise and buy yourself a little treat now and then, okay?
Love you. XX.

Live shots donated by muthafuckin M-M-Michelle M-M-Margherita.

Last post I made bold claims about how this post would be a thrilling tale of debauchery, tits, expensive pants and public humiliation. Well, I don't want to back away completely, but my lawyers have expressed concern about full disclosure of the details of  what-I-did-on-my-night-off.

The short story is that Svensk uber-vixen/taste-maker Sara Isobel Shakarchi and her renaissance-girl-bro Tilde Evelina took me out for some drinks and loose talk in the Shoreditch (innit) area.  They introduced me to a pal of theirs, fashion gadabout and certified loose-cannon Daniel Strandman (from the house of Julian Red) who embarrassed the dung out of me by introducing me to his freinds as "Fucking Ben from fucking Civil Civic, the best fucking band in the fucking world, man! I'm fucking serious, man!".

What followed was a nightmare of bad behavior and poor life choices that still turns my stomach to think about. I have no-one to blame but myself, but fuck that, I choose to blame Daniel anyway. I tried to find a picture of him online, so I could post it with a huge bold warning underneath. But all I could find was this picture of Eva Strandman, who I suspect is his psychotic, gun-having grandma. It'd make alot of sense.

"Daniel....DANIEL!!! Quit hanging out with those evil 

queers and come shoot some elk with old Granny Eva."

In summary, many thanks to Sara, Mathilda and Daniel for the good times. Mwah!

Anyway, I'm shifting the thrust of this post to our Saturday night gig in Camden, at Proud in the Stables Market.

As you can sort of see from this photo, the back half of the venue is a bunch of old stables which have been converted into private booths for patrons. Now imagine this space packed to bursting point with hideous, screeching slags in cocktail dresses and their dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers-covered-in-hair-gel boyfriends.
Horrible, horrible. I've tried everything to blank out the memory.

Not an actual photo from the night, but an aproximate illustration of the kind of ignorant, cashed-up scum I'm ranting about. I just put "Essex Clubbers" into Google images and it jumped right out. Is that Hasselhoff??

In my (usually offensive and arrogant) opinion, Hitler should have left the European Jewry alone and gone after THESE fucks. That would be a Thousand Year Reich I could get behind.

Fortunately we didn't have to do much mixing with these putrid assholes. The crowd in the band room were much less smug and offensive. Anyway, we were playing first-on, on a bill that included local popsters "Fiction", who both Aaron and I were keen to see after listening to the choons on their Myspace and having a little bop in the loungeroom. Nice shit.

We, however, were not nice shit. For the first time ever in the History of Civic, The Box had a series of personal crises and we were forced to stop multiple songs in mid-flight. The effect of this was that even when we convinced it to play, we were rattled and jittery and played with anti-swagger. Horrible.

But these things happen, even to awesome, seasoned craftsmen like us, and we managed to play a few songs from beginning to end without incident. Apologies to the crowd. We were not on form, but hopefully you got the drift. Thanks to that Irish couple who laughed at my Aussie joke and shook our hands post gig.

In post stage news, I was shocked and pleased to meet  and drink with an old high-school friend who had come along to check us out. Michelle Magherita, in the many, many years that I wasn't keeping track of her, has become a powerhouse of creative action, playing bass in international touring acts, running a small label or two, and doing fashion journalism just for kicks and loose change.

MM, with bass, on stage somewheres, killing it for Canberra.

 Turns out not ALL of my friends were pre-destined for either suburban slavery or drug addiction and early death. Nice to know....really nice to know.

Blah blah rattle blah. I'm hoping that tonight we can re-balance the cosmic scales by tearing the mthrfkn roof off The Windmill (mostly so I can play with Ben the dog). Come on down and help make it happen!!!!!

P.S. If your wondering why this post contains no mention of Aarons' sickening behavior, it's because The Cube still has him under it's nerdy spell and he's meek as a kitten. So don't be shy! Come to Brixton and meet the new Mr Cupples!
Thanks to Michelle for the moody live shots.

For over a year I have been searching for an affordable and non-surgical way to manage Aarons irrational behavior, crippling phobias, acts of seemingly random violence and general anti-social behavior.

Who would have thunk that a popular puzzle toy from the eighties would not only take an iron grip on Aarons frightening imagination, but also render him docile and pliable.

Thankyou, Mr Rubik.

Jesus H Christ on a jumping castle, my head HURTS!
But we'll get to that later. First things first, let's heap some more venom on the entity that is fast becoming my eternal fucking nemesis. Easyjet.

"Got a gig in London on thursday, huh? Better start walking, shithead. Hahahhahaaa!"

In theory it's simple. You book a flight, you turn up, you get on the plane and go somewhere.
In practise it's like a massive dose of blue-balls. The bitch doesn't put out and you end up back at your flat, tired and angry.
Yes indeed. Once again I hauled my stinking carcass out to BCN International and spent many hours in the cramped and wretched confines of terminal 1C only to have the flight cancelled on me. I'm starting to suspect that Easyjet doesn't actually have ANY AEROPLANES!! They just borrowed a few at the start to create the image of a functioning airline and then dropped them off back at the hire joint.

Anyway, craaaazy old Aaron hopped to it and booked me on a British Airways flight at lunchtime thursday and I flew in James Bond style right into the city of London.

See you on monday, baby. I'm off to play bass in London, innit.

I had only just exited the terminal when Aaron drove up in an old Toyota Landcruiser with the word "minge" spraypainted in huge gold letters across the bonnet. The nest of business geeks and yuppie voyagers waiting for cabs stared at me with a mix of pity and contempt as I clambered in and we took off with a great belch of foul black smoke.

Inside the car there was a hideous odour, like decomposing cat-food, but when I started rolling down my window Aaron jabbed a forefinger into my neck and starting screaming at me.
"Keep you hands to yourself." he yelled. "This is a friends car, and I don't want you fucking it up."

He seemed tense and irrational, so I put my hands in my pockets and tried to doze as he ran red light after red light all the way into Shoreditch (innit).

Cargo. They've got a Banksy out back. Ooooooooooh!!!

When we pulled up outside Cargo he suddenly became listless and depressed so I left him listening to a classic rock station while I loaded our gear into the venue and became aquainted with the various people we had to deal with over the next 6 hours (promoter, front of house engineer, waitresses ect).
Aaron finally came out of the strange funk that had afflicted him and we managed to soundcheck and commence drinking without incident.

The show itself was loud and enjoyable, and the boozy hep-cat crowd (who were really just waiting for headline act "Ruby Suns") coughed up some decent applause.

Aaron comes out of his mental hole long enough to "Rock Out".

I checked some of the Ruby Suns act, which seemed like a big barrel of fun, but I was suffering from post-gig jitters which fucked with my attention span. So I shuffled outside and wandered distractedly around the beer garden, smoking and avoiding eye-contact with people until I was confronted by something short and dark and sexy.

Lord have mercy. I just made a mess in my jeans...again!!!.

Ye Gods! It was Gothenburg promoter/selecta/woman-about-town Sara Shakarchi!!!! (see Civic Chronicle #6.2) I braced myself for more insults and beer-shoes, but her attitude seemed to have softened since we last met and she chatted amiably with me and introduced me to her friend Tilde Evelina, a young Svensk singer/songwriter/foreign policy wonk and Chopin enthusiast.

I relaxed somewhat and basked in the glow of these two lovely and talented ladies, who smoked all my cigarettes, quizzed me about Australian politics and made me look (to casual observers) like a winner.

Sometimes it's nice to live a lie, just for a couple of hours.

The comedic icing on the nights cake came from Aarons beautiful but trouble-prone lawyer fiance, who fell into conversation with the Ruby Suns singer and praised, in all sincerity, "that Paul Simon song off Graceland you guys covered."

Seldom has the elephant in any room been exposed with more blithe and offhand style. Poor bastard.

It gave me a nice idea about how to fuck with Aarons' head. I can just pay some chick to walk up to him after a show and say "You guys are the best Sonic Youth covers band I've ever seen, but you should get a singer".

Next issue I'll go into some detail about where and how I got the screaming, churning, horror-fat hangover that has just soaked up 2 grams of Ibuprofen without blinking. It involves bad Swedes, 400 euro jeans, Turkish hippies and an East End strip club, so you know it's going to be a champagne post.

P.S Thanks and shout-outs to Clemence and Bird On A Wire promotions. Also check out http://livemusic.fm/ who interviewed us before the show and have blogged nice words about our noise.