Velvet Hammer – The Mardi Gras Alternative (for the sleazy and greasy).

Easy peasy, greased up and sleazy!

FACEBOOK EVENT – so your friends know how rad you are!
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CHOPFEST IV

Like we don’t love playing The Annandale with Totes Unicorn!

MOTHERFUCK

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Facebook Event!

Black Cherry NYE – The Ultimate Gay Party!

That’s right, you sweet bastards, SOBs, dirty ladies, goths (and reformed goths), men of low moral character, possible werewolves, educated dandies, high functioning alcoholics, smut lovers, pirates, swingers, sexy librarians, clergymen, fashion conscious punks, NBA players, tiger trainers, stoned botanists, rap dudes, history buffs and everyone else, we’re playing Black Cherry NYE at the Factory Theater in Marrickville.
Bring us party favours and booze money. We’ll provide an unrelenting tide of sleaze and rock n’ roll.

Party Like It's 2999!

TICKETS HERE!
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More Stupid Shit from the Phone of WH

This week we went to Wombarra, we recorded with Hammer at Def Wolf and maybe I’m finally getting a pomeranian.

Bearded Immortals – A Poster!

No Quiet Nights

Last night? What the fuck happened? The eggs tasted good and there was so much gin. Dreams of tongue kissing something that has an impossibly long face and huge hands. Dreams.
I wake panting, face down, burning inside and the feathers scratch my skin, the nettles and tinsel dance and tickle and poke and find their way inside me. Some kind of trash bird nest. A note blurs into sensible.
Don’t be sorry, you sorry bitch.
Motherfuckers.
Gore full, my belly bloats out in front and my breasts are pregnant tender. Beak marks and teeth, ripples of red around the areola , bile in my throat.
I’ve gotta get out of this tree and back to the underground.
Down in the woods, down on my luck, down on myself. Who the fuck did I get down with? Go down on?
I’ll say sorry to the white owl king and start again because every night is a night out.
The PA shudders through the woodland tunnels:
Come on down with the wolves and the owls, get on down where they hoot and howl
Dance around in the skin of a sow
Get the spook piggies and a thorn covered crown
Ooh la la, Pom Pom le Rouge
Tell us what you did last night!”
There is fear in the halls. I’m stinking of it with every breath, like a recovering alcoholic, dream taunts and piss stank skin, bags under my eyes holding all the old knowing that will blow me wide open and leave me on the floor before him, spread-eagled and barren.
Flashbacks from black to brown:
What’s the dog doing wearing the head of a man?
Now I’ve got a burn in her gut and a bite on my hand, where are my rings? At least he let me keep my fingers.
I must remember to take the appropriate measures, kill the baby goat with copper wire and hot golden broth.
Visit the apothecary and make love to the alchemist. Set fire to the evidence as a form of penitence.
When it gets too hot, just remember, there are no quiet nights in the arctic.More from the PA:
“Down on your knees in my court”
He appears in his terribly clean robe, impossibly albino, erection jutting at a proud and awkward angle.
The Owl king hoots and calls for more whores.
“Who will spit? Who will swallow, it’ll all be the same and the night plays out like a rosemary stain!”
As usual he is dramatic at the moment he approaches climax.
I say “good morning” in the evening and give ersatz curtsy, dipping my chest low and feeling my nipples remember the chewing hounds, birds and men of yester eve.
He’s checking out my bosom and I’m playing his game
“Are you sorry, Le Rouge?” He booms and gushes and the small women faint and drown while the larger ones set sail to stranger shores.
I’m always absolved, so I never abstain.
“Yes.”
Now I powders my cheeks and smear honest blood on my teats, swig absinthe in the latrine and laugh long and loud at the drowning dead, their spirits won’t sink as long as He provides the vodka, by barrel and burlesque, they are kept afloat.
I’ll Keep dancing with the dragon gone from scarlet to green and let great white wings canopy my bed, even if it means oceans and apologies and fear of the dark, a hatred of gears and steam and wires and clean living. I’ll say “M’lord, it meant naught, an honest mistake,” and false men in black with fuck my corpse at my wake.
When I wake on the morrow, I’ll say sorry again
Even if Hell freezes over.
Remember that there are no quiet nights in the brimstone lodge.

The Pale Surgeon

Cold swamp water, like a bathtub where the diseases meet for bukkake parties.
She is splashing. Skirts low, a floundering mermaid cursed with legs, soon to be hogtied and dipped down and down again.
I can hear the mongrel kicking at the walls of her womb.
Unnatural. What is that smell? Over the sulphur burbles and fetid whispers, what wonders are fettered within this awful apparition of awkward womanhood?
Fecund and freezing.
My claws clack.
My claws clap.
My claws clack, clap and splash.
My claws glisten.
The sheers are calling, but first: a syringe.
Booming, my eyestalks achieve the pinhole focus necessary for this work.
The ants are running off my carapace in silk black rivulets, giving up tiny deaths when they don’t make it to their leaf galleons, fleeing this terrible scene.
They’ve seen it all before.
Check the bracken stirrups and mangrove cells – a sweet hell of claws and gumbo, a pot for the placenta, possibly and what to do with her skin?
The slip-off trade is good down here and I heard that old Guichard is looking for something to fuck, so maybe if I dip an old slattern into this one’s facade, well, the sonofabitch can really get to grips.
Darling, says I. Darling, you look unabashedly a’feared, what say you let your antlers hang out, I can cover where the ache forms.
She moans.
Tell me where it hurts. What if I do this?
What about this?
And this?
How about here?
And here?
She coughs twice and the viscous worms dribble like latter day ‘aints down the breasts of Saint Barbara.
Get the golden sword and prepare my sheers.
Where are the forceps? What the fuck do you mean we only have wire and cat guts?
At least tell me we have that unicorn horn I was saving.
Ah, yes.
Spirals without end and the dust walls crumble. I can hear it howling.
Harmonies.
A gentle tap on my shoulder.
I will brook no interruptions!
A second. Less gentle. My mandibles clack clatter snap.
Sir, you raise my consternation to the very ires that bale in hell!
I come apart at the joint where my tail slithers into hip level vertebrate, upper torso twisting backwards while my hard cock, still sleeved in unicorn horn and tied tight with violin strings reaches it’s opus.
His monocle has misted with the heat of rage and gloved hands want vengeance for the soiled finery, my ichor and blood mixing and matting with his fur.
Weirdly, my lower body moves of it’s own accord – drowning ants jeer at my comeuppance.
Then he pulls off my head.

My Sister, The Tramp

It has come to my attention that a lot of the ‘search engine’ terms that lead to this site relate to my sweet sister, Kimba. Obviously, we need more of her on here. Enjoy.

The Skeleton’s Problematic Granddaughter – A Tale of Southern Horror

PART 1

“Shut up, children, I got a story to tell,” says WH, drunk as hell and looking only half as frightened as he should.
What is downstairs?
He spills wine so red as to almost be black down his tight clinging shirt, his beard and chest hair a horrible briar patch – who knows what evils lurk within.
“A long time ago, before I was born, there was a girl, a girl . . .” his eyes glaze over, flashing a dangerous shade of void.
He belches softly and continues, voice all gravel and horror.
“A girl, she was called Deardrie Fell.”
“Who was she, WH?” asks a slip of a girl, her flaxen hair almost as fair as her skin.
“My dear, stupid child,” slurs the grizzled sonofabitch, “she was The Skeleton’s Problematic Granddaughter . . .”
The hideous fellow now leaps from his mouldy velure covered seat, spraying the children with the blood like droplets of his chosen beverage. Wheeling across the room, he grabs a poker from beside the fire and storms out of the room.
The children look aghast at me for guidance. Hush, I tell them, hush. Don’t make him get weirder than he already is.
We hear him, stomping down the stairs into the wine cellar.
Silence.
A long silence.
The children whisper amongst themselves. They want their parents.
Your parents are gone, children. Hush. He may return.
There is a terrible clanging beneath the floorboards. Now screeching. A triumphant bellowing creates an ear jarring harmony. Silence. Not quite.
He is whispering.
The flaxen haired girl begins to sob.
I turn to comfort her.
“Now, children. Gather round. You. Open this.”
He is back on the mouldy, red velure seat, pointing a dusty bottle of wine at me.
The poker is covered in gore, resting across his torn black jeans.
His Chuck Taylors are likewise adorned.
With no other recourse, I uncork the wine and the room is filled with a wicked miasma.
“Milk of the cockroach teat!” He laughs wildly, spraying spittle, tongue green, teeth yellow and black.
“Smell that funk? It’s the swamp. Mangroves covered in ice and islands of glittering bone. You can almost see Old Black Louie in stilettos, walking up something’s behemoth spine when you get this stink in you.”
The children gag.
I have tears in my eyes as I fill his plastic goblet, encrusted with plastic jewels, stained around the rim, where his lips have touched it far too often.
He waves the goblet away when I proffer it to him and snatches the bottle.
He takes a rude swig. I hope that he doesn’t send me below to fetch more wine.
“Now. No more interruptions.” He spits in an ashtray.
“Deadrie Fell, she was a skeleton’s problematic granddaughter . . .”

PART 2

I blanch some when he looks at me over the top of his grease smeared glasses, fogged up from his constant perspiration in spite of the bitter cold that the fire pitifully tries to fight off.
He smiles, yellow and black and red dribbling into red again.

“A long while back, before even I was born, there was a city made of glass,” he is whispering and the children gather close, they can probably smell his guts rotting within his ramshackle body.
“There was also a city where worms lived and a city where everything was already over. These cities were surrounded by the darkest of woods. The deepest of all dark woods. You don’t get dark or woods like that anymore.”
“Why not?” whispers a fat little boy of eight or nine.
WH glares at him and then softens, blows a long whistling sigh, spittle and wine.
“Night forgot what she was for, son.”
The fat boy seems happy enough with a response, though if he knew what WH really meant, I think that he’d leave the room crying, he wouldn’t sleep again, either.
“In the city of Ends, there was a woman, a very beautiful woman, by the measure of any time.
Men came calling on her, to paint her portrait, to make busts of her wonderful face. To ask her hand.
She sent them away.
She called them boring and to her, in the city where everything has already happened, this could only be expected.
She wanted the wild.”
WH creaks up from his chair, the children lean back; in terror or merely as a reaction to his overwhelming odour.
He drips perspiration about him as he performs a slow dance, gathering an old moth eaten black sheet from a pile of soiled linen on the floor.
“And the boy! He had wings!”
He swoops about the room, cackling and quorking the nightmares of rats.
“Who?” the children ask in unison, squeaky voices trembling.
“The Flautist ,little ones! The Flautist of course!”
WH leans by the hearth, pulling long from his bottle. Oh Morning Star, please don’t let him finish that before dawn.
I cannot bear to go below the floorboards, not tonight.
Not any night.
What is down there?
The drunkard is back in his chair now, left leg crossed over the right and a jar of whiskey in hand. Something is floating in it. I don’t want to get closer.
He shows the children and they giggle.
“My dear, look at this . . .”
I sidle over and peer into the jar.
There I am, afloat in an amber sea, waving up, mouth opening and closing, but voice too small to be heard.
He drinks me down and I swoon.
“Here, sit on my knee,” he says and I am powerless to do anything but obey.
I can smell him. He smells of what the night was about, even though that was before he was born.
“I’m far older by way of the innards, dear,” he laughs so hard into my ear that I want to be sick.
Can he truly read my thoughts.
“The Flautist was wild,” he says, stroking my hair with the back of his hand.
“He was born in a city made of worms. But rarely. Rarely was he there.
In the city of Ends, the young woman lived on an austere estate that her father had owned before her, before he left for the woods. He knew about the dark and the night and why stars can’t be trusted and what is was to visit with rats.
He built ships and played the fiddle where the nymphs danced, covered in white bugs that glowed like morning and cast no shadows in that light.
In a city of Ends, no one looks twice at a skeleton gentleman, as long as he comports himself in a manner befitting once of his social standing and, oh my, he was nothing if not conscientious . . . and dead.”
The children are as close as they dare get to WH and his voice is a low, dark rumble. I can feel it rattling through his body as he speaks. I don’t think that I could stand up if I wanted to.
“His daughter was a great musician, much as he was. But in place of the wandering fiddle, she took to the ponderous heavings of the cello. So many nights, legs splayed upon the stool until one day, she broke a string!”
I spill to the floor, atop the screaming children as WH heaves to his feet and hurls his half finished jar into the fire place.
The room goes pitch and the heat rises, even as the rain begs to be let in, clawing at the tin roof, chattering on the windows.
He is glowing, or rather, the darkness is not touching him.
“She went into the woods . . .”

PART 3

Under the floor, something moans, impossibly loud and low.
WH is not in the room.
The children weep and clutch at my skirts.
I gather them to me and sing.

Entendez-vous dans la plaine
Ce bruit venant jusqu’à nous?
On dirait un bruit de chaîne
Se traînant sur les cailloux.
C’est le grand Lustukru qui passe,
Qui repasse et s’en ira
Emportant dans sa besace
Tous les petits gâs
Qui ne dorment pas!
Lon lon la,
Lon lon la, lon lon la, lire la, lon la!
La, lon la!
Quelle est cette voix démente
Qui traverse nos volets?
Non, ce n’est pas la tourmente
Qui joue avec les galets:
C’est le grand Lustukru qui gronde
Qui gronde … et bientôt rira
En ramassant à la ronde
Tous les petits gâs
Qui ne dorment pas!
Lon lon la,
Lon lon la, lon lon la, lire la, lon la!
La, lon la!
Qui donc gémit de la sorte,
Dans l’enclos, tout près d’ici?
Faudra-t-il donc que je sorte
Pour voir qui soupire ainsi?
C’est le grand Lustukru qui pleure:
Il a faim et mangera
Crus-tout-vifs, sans pain ni beurre,
Tous les petits gâs
Qui ne dorment pas!
Lon lon la,
Lon lon la, lon lon la, lire la, lon la!
La, lon la!
Qui voulez-vous que je mette
Dans le sac au vilain Vieux?
Mon Doric et ma Jeannette
Viennent de fermer les yeux:
Allez vous-en, méchant homme,
Quérir ailleurs vos repas!
Puisqu’ils font leur petit somme,
Non, vous n’aurez pas
Mes deux petits gâs!

The room is lit. I have no idea how or for how long.
He is in his chair, clapping, slowly.
Sardonic, discoloured smile.
“Very good, dear one. Very good.
Now, let us continue . . .”

Taking The Throne: cooling down

So, the Taking The Throne tour is over and everyone survived, everything intact bar a touch of dignity, terrible hangovers and some embarrassing bruises in strange places.
Highlights included:
Late night after party in Newcastle with Brothers Grim & The Blue Murders and Kira Puru & The Bruise. Let’s just say that I bit off more than I could chew, lost my favourite kicks, Slim’s iPod and a few hours of my memory. How BZ and me made it back to Sydney in one piece, I’ll never really know. I don’t think that I want to.
Selling out The Vanguard. Okay, there was more to it than that. I think we finished the rider well before Kira and her boys even went on, but luckily, that is a venue that knows how to look after its acts. Needless to say, everyone was well liquored to hell and by the time we hit stage, the people of Sydney obviously in the same sinking ship. You can check photos of that gig over at FasterLouder.
Katoomba hooked us back up with our sister/brother band, The Snowdroppers. Far and away our best time in the mountains so far, it was just a bummer that we had to leave early to swing back to Sydney for an early morning film clip shoot. May the Morning Star preserve all who took part in that evil, evil day.
Catching a plane to Melbourne instead of driving and having a surf rock loving cab driver get us to the airport. What a guy!
Opening for BG&TBM in their home town. Great sound, great sound guy and watching James Grim shake his centaur sized ding-a-ling. Unfortunately, this was also the night that my nocturnal/slumbering wanderings and ramblings were at their most disturbing.
After picking up my little sister, KL Conroy from Melbourne airport, we drove to Ballarat. Gangsta rap and the road only gets better when she begins with her whorish ramblings. What a time! The Yard Apes packed out the venue and we got to really give it to the ladies and gents before we grabbed Blue Murder, Devlin and under the instruction of James, undertook a post midnight, booze and truckstop food fuelled race back to Melbourne for a ‘shirts off, pants off’ rave. Ironic dancing has never felt that good.
Wow. What a fucking final gig! After James dropped some Public Enemy styles the night before, we hit back with our ODB cover. That was good to get off our chests. Not only that, but the bar was packed well before doors opened and the place was ready to party. Nothing changed all night and it was great to catch some dudes and chicks that we haven’t seen in years. I even saw my old ‘zine editor. We’re going to resurrect something that should have stayed dead. Stay tuned.
Tour AwardsLeast Sleep: Ol’ Blacktooth Marks
Worst Jokes: KL Conroy
Keeping Shit Together: BZ
Most Money Spent on Food: Smokin’ D
Most Money Spent on Booze: BZ
Most Booze Consumed: BZ/WH
Most Rhymes Dropped: WH
Night Rider Driving : Slim Pickin’s
Best Hosts: Ham, Damien and Charles Barkley
Craziest Legs: Slim Pickin’s
Most Showers: Ol’ Blacktooth Marks
Biggest Power Playa: BZ