Scanned from Derek Taylor’s Fifty Years Adrift (which we’d dearly like to see, hint hint), via Galactic Ramble

Comets backstage at ATP with Chris Corsano, 2006.

Comets to play ATP 2013

June 2013.

Hello Comets On Fire friends and fans,

It’s been a while. Almost 5 years since our last gig to be more precise. In the meantime our membership has made other kinds of records and toured with other bands, drifted apart geographically to reside in new regions and a few of our members have been blessed with children. We are all still alive and relatively well!

In January of 2012 Ben Chasny invited the semi-estranged COF membership to join him as his backing band in rehearsal and recording for the Six Organs of Admittance album “Ascent”. It had been almost 4 years since we stepped off the stage after our last performance at the Sub Pop 20 anniversary festival up in Seattle in the summer of 2008. Rehearsing and recording the Six Organs record was a blast for all of us and we quickly found out that even though we weren’t doing a COF project specifically that the Comets spirit was clearly alive and well in the heart of our playing together as a band again.

After completion of “Ascent” some of the COF members accompanied Chasny as the Six Organs backing band on subsequent tours throughout 2012. When touring cooled down for various members in 2013 Comets began to reconvene as a group in jam sessions in Oakland to make some music, some noise, thrash out and just see what happened. From our first weekend playing music together we were thrilled and surprised by the quality and quantity of material that we were coming up with and again thrilled and reassured that the old sights, sounds and feel of the group was lifting off on command. What began as a jam session to see if the band still had a spiritual and social center most likely has become the beginning of a very leisurely paced construction on a new record. But that’s another story and there is little more to tell of it at this point other than we are being creative and creating new music as a group at a pace that is totally absent of coaxing and time pressures.

The real story here is that Comets On Fire will be performing live at the end of this year in London and at the final ATP in Camber Sands, UK. We feel that Barry Hogan and the ATP co. have played a great part in the success and general “fun” of Comets on Fire and we want to ride that holiday camp train one more time. We have great Technicolor memories of the holiday camp festivals put on by ATP and not just the moments on stage or palling around with other artists in a drunken haze but also Utrillo swinging from the chandelier in our chalet until it dislodges from the ceiling and sends him flying down on the glass table top, kids we’ve never seen before storming our trailer apartment at 3am and then kicking the bathroom door open because they couldn’t figure out how to open it (yes, it was locked, someone was inside (multiple people actually, passed out), spending long days off laying around on the picnic benches in the courtyard drinking wine and eating English cheese fresh off the southern farms and of course seeing some of the most astounding band lineups in the history of rock music crammed into one weekend on 3 different stages. I believe in the day and a half we were at the last ATP Comets attended I saw the Stooges, Sonic Youth, The Melvins, Peter Brotzmann, Flipper, Sun City Girls, Dinosaur Jr—and that’s with falling asleep early the first night due to drunkenness and jet lag and leaving at dawn Sunday morning…the shit that a fan can see with a 3 day pass and a blood transfusion on the morning of the 3rd day is absolutely mind boggling.

So anyhow, we’re doing it again. Fuck it!!! ATP is a blast, see you there.

Welcome to 2013 and the truly Post-Thatcher Age, and welcome to Julian Cope’s long delayed new album REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE: eleven sumptuous and highly charged songs that teem with outrageous orchestrations and compellingly-crafted words of protest, activism and historical richness. Weep along with the dreadful beauty of the Archdrude’s most epic ever song ‘The Armenian Genocide’, sway with the bucolic agricultural rhythms and devotional lyrics of ‘Hymn to the Odin’, pump your fists in the air to the Detroit soul of the title-track, or just give yourself entirely to the divine-but-gaping 70-minute-long musical maw, nay, the Hot Mess that is REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE. New poems? You got it! New concepts? You got it! We got the Mayans’ predictions out the way and we’re all still here. So maybe everything that went before 2013 was just a dry-run for what’s to come. Perhaps you’ll even believe that once you’ve heard the enormous scope and vision of REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE.

Annnnnnnd… Julian is now on Twitter.

Via abbeyweb.com: “Robert Crumb with Edward Abbey in Arches National Park March 24, 1985″

And: check out new interview with Mr. Gunn by Mr. Wooden Wand over at Aquarium Drunkard.