This is my personal webpage with some info you might or might not find in other places. I’ve also put up some wonderful links. Send all comments and questions to Peter Ceulemans
Current 93 and other apocalyptic folk concert reviews
Current 93 / London / Summer 1992
The first time I saw Current 93 live was in London in the summer of ’92. It was in a place named ‘The Royal Standard Walthamstow’, on Blackhorse road, somewhere very far away from the centre of London. It took us an hour to get there from Hackney, where we were staying with a friend.Fire and Ice, Death In June and NON / London / Winter 1992
My industrial friend and I had come especially to icy London to see Boyd live and direct, but the concert was cancelled. Douglas directed everyone to a nearby restaurant where we had to await forthcoming news. Fire and Ice and DIJ were definitely cancelled but NON would play in an SM-club a few miles further.
It was after 00:00 when we arrived. Us 2 innocent Flemish guys didn’t feel all too comfortable in this place of utter decadence. Pictures of Mishima, wolves and more adorned the walls. I guess only the international concert-goers (about 10 or 20) had made the effort to relocate to this place and all Londoners had gone home. So it was us internationals, Douglas’ friends (J.Balance, P. Christopherson, F.Aeswynn, T.Wakeford etc) and the local SM-crowd (who weren’t too thrilled by Boyd’s performance and couldn’t stop babbling during the show which was very annoying) who watched NON (Doug, Boyd, Michael Moynihan (?) - of this last one I’m not sure) perform. The show was short and very powerful.
The walk to the hotel took us 3 hours through the pouring rain along the dark and dangerous London streets.
Current 93 / Paris / 5 January 1993
It was the morning before the concert. My girlfriend, a friend and I were walking on the Paris streets and met Tibet. He remembered my girlfriend but he didn’t remember me. Meeting Tibet for the second time was not as overwhelming as the first time, but then again we did shake his hand and he kissed my girlfriend who didn’t wash her cheek for weeks afterwards. Neither did she want me to kiss nor touch her for over two months.Death In June / Paris / 6 January 1993
The next day Death In June played - it was the first time I saw a whole show (they played an encore after the C93 concert the day before). The whole performance with the mask and uniform was absolutely stunning. The audience was collectively lifted up to a higher level of awareness. And if you didn’t like the music you could always look at Simon Norris’ tattoos. And Current 93 did an encore.Current 93 / Nevers, France / June 1996
After a 10-hour train ride we put up our tent at a beautiful camping on the borders of the Loire. It was a very well-organised two-day festival in a 17th or 18th century rococco theatre.Death In June, Strength Through Joy, Kapo, Scorpion Wind, NON / ‘t Syndroom, Sint Niklaas, Belgium/ 20 december 1996
We visited this concert with our international crew. Some German apocalyptic folk experts and some English friends (f.e. Robert - the guy who wrote the Death In June book "Misery and Purity") had come over for the two Belgian concerts of this tour.Death In June, Strength Through Joy, Kapo, Scorpion Wind, NON / Racing, Gavere, Belgium/ 21 december 1996
Winter solstice. Same stuff except Boyd doing an extra poem and an a capella Lee Hazlewood song from Lee’s "Requiem for an almost lady" (1971). Red lights and Boyd screaming in the corner... So much bad taste on two days... what can you hope for after a thing like that?Les Joyaux de la Princesse and Allerseelen/ Democrazy, Gent, Belgium/ december 1997
Les Joyaux had just released the classic "Douce France 10". But the show didn’t go too well. Nobody even knew it had started, so the right atmosphere wasn’t there to start with. My brother had to go outside because of lack of oxygen (too much cigarette smoke, not enough air). Only the noisiest parts did it for me.Der Blutharsch and NON / Gent, Belgium, spring 1998
The place was packed and the colour was black. Der Blutharsch played behind dense camouflage nets so I can’t say anything about the performance because I didn’t see one. I did hear it but I can’t say how much of it was tapes and how much was live.Der Blutharsch, Fire and Ice, Death In June / Cactus Club, Bruges, Belgium/ 22 november 1998
No driver. Too many degrees celsius beneath zero. Train strike. Too old. Too weak. So I stayed home.Ernte, Waldteufel and BLOOD AXIS / Cactus Club, Bruges, Belgium / 4 december 1998
This concert was organized by Grondwerken (as were the last three I reviewed).
No excuses this time. Alone into the alone. I boarded the train at 17:00 and exchanged trains in Gent, just to lose some time, because as always I’d be way too early. And reading in train-stations is just too depressing. So I took a very slow train from Gent to Bruges (reading on the train is fun). Then I walked to the Cactus Club, very slowly, because it was 19:35 and doors only opened at 21:00
Waldteufel and Ernte each did a few folky songs.
By the time Blood Axis started it was almost twelve o’clock. Line-up: Michael Moynihan, Annabel Lee, Markus Wolff, and a unknown bass-player (help me out if you know). Blood Axis started with what I consider a blessing ritual, long horn and mead included. "Herjafather" was the most impressive song amongst many impressive songs, for example "Storm of steel", "Reign I forever" - with Moynihan swinging a giant hammer around, "Electricity" and many more. It was a very long set, more than an hour and a half. This was the last show of the tour. Weep if you weren’t there because it might take some time before we’ll see them again.
I was able to hitch a ride in the direction of home with some fellow Antwerpians and hitch-hiking further on from Antwerp through the snow-storm and ice I managed to get home before dawn.
Note: It’s always the old, weird and / or crazy that give you rides when you hitch. Bless them and curse the decent man.
Mykel Board is a columnist for the punkrock magazine Maximum Rock'n Roll. His topics include free speech, sex, punkrock "ethics" (whatever that is), Life, work and how to avoid it, DIY, dogmatic thinking, ecology, underground politics etc. On this website you'll find Lots of Mykel Board's columns!
Mykel Board has got his own stuff on the web at the Mykel Board homepage
I’ve included some quotes from his columns.
"I've written before about my view of God. She's about 9 feet tall, pretty, wears a black leather bikini and wields a fierce whip. We are her toys. She tries to make our lives so bad that we kill ourselves. Occasionally, she tempts us with fragile moments of delight. Before long, shit smashes them into tiny shards. We pray. She laughs.
Our job is to fight the bitch. To make the most of the puddle of puke we live in. To grab by the neck each awful day and wring some joy out of it. We're all gonna go sometimes. Maybe we'll meet her when we do. I wanna be ready. I wanna fistfuck the bitch and say, "OK, I'm dead, but I beat you. I used those good moments. Made some myself. Despite your cracking whip." " ... "There’s no telling what nefarious plans the bitch goddess has cooked up. She'll find a way to fuck us over when we least expect it. There's no doubt about that. The best we can do is to live our lives hard while we're able. Not to give up. To do those things we've got to do while we can. To kiss who needs kissing.
To interview who needs interviewing. To support who needs supporting. To fuck who needs fucking. To trounce who needs trouncing.
Make a mistake? Apologize, fix it if you can, and go on. Any minute that carpet is gonna be pulled out from beneath your feet.
You're gonna take a nasty spill. Fall and you can't get up. Just make sure you can look back to your time on your feet and say it was worth the fight."
"Hunting and fishing are two of the most ecological and environmentally sound activities you can engage in. Provided you eat what you kill, these activities are quick, fun, and immediately useful.
By avoiding horrible factory-farming products, you refuse to participate in the bio-engineered, over-injected, slaughterhouse horror of modern animal farming. You go directly to the food chain. You join it like any other animal. You kill a single being, like a lion downing a gazelle.
What about growing your own food?
Even if you want to spend the time and effort doing this (not fun), you still are environmentally destructive. You must use land. You have to pull weeds or clear forests. You destroy more nature than any food you eat. Killing an animal in the wild does minimal damage. Destroying wilderness is permanent.
Organic farms destroy much more than responsible hunting and fishing. Vegetarianism is destruction. It's amazing how many people avoid the logic of this truth."
"During the sixties, a frog named Herbert Marcuse wrote a book called, "A Critique of Pure Tolerance." In that book he introduced the idea of Repressive Tolerance. That idea says that tolerating repressive ideas is itself repression. This concept became the justification for lefty attacks. Newspaper office bombings, machine-gunnings of writers and speakers, all were ok in the name of ending tolerance. Later that same justification became the theoretical basis to bomb abortion clinics. It is the argument of Moslem militants when they beat women for not wearing the veil.
Herbert Marcuse is wrong. Tolerance is not the enemy.
Intolerance is. Free Speech is like a muscle or your prostate. If you don't use it, it'll atrophy and disappear. Today's repression by you will bring tomorrow's repression by them.
I want to do more than give a few buck to the ACLU. I want to expand freedom to the widest possible margins. I want to allow everyone, no matter how extreme, the right to say, wear, and except for giving unwanted physical pain, do what they want. I want to let people know that it's okay to make others uncomfortable. There is no right to comfort. It's good for you to know what it's like not to be surrounded by clones of yourself."
"Some folks view getting older like tearing down a house. You've got only so many bricks. As you get older, you begin to loose them. Every heartbeat is one less time your heart will beat. Every breath is one less time your lungs will breathe. Gradually, the house falls apart until at the end, there's nothing left. The longer you're alive, the worse off you are, because you're that much closer to death.
By thinking this way, it makes perfect sense to Darby Crash yourself into an early grave. Who wants to live in a house with holes in the ceiling? It makes sense-- but it's wrong
Getting old is building a house, not tearing one down. Every time you do something, learn something, something happens to you, you add on another room. After that you can use it whenever you need it. A sixteen year old Mykel Board didn't know what it was like to take LSD in the middle of a police riot. A twenty year old Mykel Board did. A twenty year old Mykel Board had no idea what to do in bed with a bunch of horny naked people. A twenty-five year old Mykel Board did. A twenty-five year old Mykel Board would be at a loss to know how to sleep on an 18 inch strip of concrete under a guardrail in Italy with a superhighway on one side and a twenty foot drop to railroad tracks on the other. A thirty year old Mykel Board had done it. A thirty year old Mykel Board had never played at a Polish punkrock "festiwal" in a little town that was, up until then, known only for its festivals of soldiers songs. A thirty-five year old Mykel Board had. A thirty-five year old Mykel Board never had to deal with a hernia operation in a country where they expect you to bring your own chopsticks to the hospital. A forty year old Mykel Board knew step by step what it was like. A forty year old Mykel Board has never seen the capital of Mongolia, nor been to a sex club in Thailand. A fifty year old Mykel Board will have.
If your life is worthless, if every day is the same and you just live in your old house, never adding to it, then you might as well tear it down. I guess that's the case with those critics. Their metaphysical dwellings are so empty that they have no use for extra rooms, let alone a new wing with servant's quarters. I enjoyed making some additions more than others, but now they're built. I'm as happy as a fly on shit that I can use them when I want to."
"But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and, at first, it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces..."
"Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument, and in all chances and enters in at many doors; by violence and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist; by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour; by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen into the hardness and sharpness of a dagger, or water thawed into the floods of a river; by a hair or a raisin; by violent motion or sitting still; by severity or dissolution; by God's mercy or God's anger; by everything in providence and everything in manners; by everything in nature and everything in chance. Eripitur persona, manetres; we take pains to heap up things useful to our life, and get our death in the purchase; and the person is snatched away, and the goods remain. And all this is the law and constitution of nature; it is a punishment to our sins, the unalterable event of Providence, and the decree of Heaven. The chains that confine us to this condition are strong as destiny, and immutable as the eternal laws of God."
"So is every man. He is born in vanity and sin. He comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production; and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness, some of them without any interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad and very sorrowful...
Others ride longer in the storm, maybe until seven years of vanity be expired and then, peradventure, the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness and the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chance of a child or a careless nurse, or drowning in a pale of water, or being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which has no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical. And so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of undigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour.
Homer calls man a leaf, the smallest; Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow, another, the dream of a shadow of smoke; but St.James spoke by a more excellent spirit, saying our life is but a vapour, that is to say, drawn from the air by a celestial influence, made of smoke and the lighter parts of water, tossed by the wind and moved by the motion of a superior body, without virtue in itself and lifted up on high or left below, according as it pleases the demands of its foster fathers..."
"I mean, you’ve got two choices: anarchy and destruction, or order and life. And you can have order and life like a beautiful symphony, because we have a capacity to put the mind in order because we have the mind and the intelligence to do so. We don't need anarch--that's primate, that's animal."
"I understand the games of prejudice and fear. I love everything as much as I can. But I'm not out of perspective. I understand the order of all life and I understand that if this planet does not come to one world government with a one world economy with a base reality of ecology for earth, if we don't put earth first, we're not going to have any planet left. Now, any Christian that don't want to live on this earth they should get to heaven's gate as quick as they can. They should find any way off this planet that they can find in their own time because this is the last roundup. The kids are coming back again and they want harmony and they want peace on earth. I want my peace on earth. But not only do I want my peace on earth, I want my trees on earth and I want my animals on earth. You've destroyed a whole rain forest. This United States of America was a beautiful rain forest. All those dams -- those Hoover dams and Tennessee Valley Authorities that you've got running up and down the water, that's why the dam water's so fucked up now is all them aquaducts and those artificial lakes and rivers that they create for those shopping malls and to water their automobiles down. They've created an artificial environment on the planet with that industrial revolution and its killing all the life on earth."
"Open up the dope valves and let the people take all the dope they want. Let ‘em dope themselves on out till there’s nothing left of it. Let the people do what they want to do. Take the rules and regulations off of it and then what you have left is the people that want to live. The people that want to die, let ‘em go. The people that want to destroy themselves, let them go ahead and destroy themselves."
"Wake up the public? HA... they’re not worth two bags of shit - a few people can get through and touch life; the rest are like chickens trying to get over on someone else to feel reassured. Their ego gets big and their dick gets soft."
"Have you ever been in a desert in the night and go out and look at all -- look in the sky? And look at all those stars and say, "What can I possibly have an idea about? How could I hold a mind up in face of that?" You know. We've got to clean the water up. Or there's going to be no water. We've got to clean the air up, or there's going to be no air. We've got to get off the trees, or there's going to be no air or water. We're taking our life support systems away. Let me say this. You walk 60 miles, it takes you three days. You get in a car, it takes you an hour. You don't realize how long 60 miles is. And how big a jet airplane travels through the sky, burning up all the atmosphere. And how fast you can get from California to England when it used to take us years and years. The world is a little place. The world is not a big place. Wake up. The world is a computer. The world is a spaceship."
"MANSON:... Everybody wants to be an individual. No one wants to give up their individual for the collective base. You know, if you don't have a collective atmosphere towards some unity of something for some reason, then youre just a total blob, jellyfish, or whatever.
SECONDS MAGAZINE: It was a bad day when everyone decided they were individuals.
MANSON: Yeah, yes, yes. It was probably some king years ago didn't want to bother with somebody, so he just told them, "Yeah, go be an individual, leave me alone!" "
"To get yourself together you need not even think there is anyone else in this world. I don’t need to look down on, or get off on, or get over on. The hardest thing to overcome is our own lies, confusion and our jealousy!"
"Here is a story: Two men are in a cell. One said he wanted to die and was going to kill himself. The other said he wouldn’t let him. So the first guy killed the other guy and then killed himself. If people want to eat shit you can’t stop them without going with them."
If you are interested in tons of stories on extreme human stupidity, weird misfortune and tragic death then take a look at The Morbid Fact du Jour archives An example:
"Helen Greenlee was a young and pretty apprentice embalmer who was also, as fate would have it, a necrophiliac. In 1979, she eloped with a corpse from the funeral home where she worked in Sacramento. They drove into the desert together and up into the mountains. The two lovers were found the next morning. Karen had attempted suicide by overdose and had left a suicide note which read, "Why do I do it? Why? Why? Fear of love, relationships. No romance ever hurt like this." Necrophilia wasn't illegal, so Karen was tried for stealing the hearse and for interfering with a burial. She was sentenced to 11 days in jail, 2 years on probation and a $255.00 fine."
Tons and tons about radical philosophy (Philip K.Dick, Robert Anton Wilson...), conspiracies, weirdness and the lot (including lots of links) on The disinformation website
Intellectual heretics! Follow this link to The best Blood Axis site on the web
Off course you’re a big Spiritualized fan! Therefore, take a look at these two excellent websites:
All about Spiritualized
All the rest about Spiritualized