Looking Through Your Window

After seeing Lowri Evans’ two perfromances that I’ve reviewed just before this blog post, I wrote a facebook message about the week those two happenings happened. Here it is, again:

“What a strangely surprising and bloody lovely week it’s been for me. Starting on Monday with lovely Lowri Evans naked with a big smelly dead fish, then a couple of days later smashing an old stereo with Lowri Evans in hi-vis flourescent yellow jacket and drawing a very childish picture of that event on Darren Adcock and Tasha Whittle’s pen pressure triggered sci-fi modular synth and later that day watching the very unpredictable and surreal nightmare horror film “Possession.” On Friday I heard headbangers Aggressive Perfektor play some violent metal holocaust and mistook a gruff vocal for, “Our drummer is Tim Horrocks, he plays too fast!” followed by a band who sounded like eighties chart metal with a guitarist in Union Jack spandex trousers who I could only really listen to for a couple of songs. On Saturday I went to an all day gig featuring the noisy exploits of Flea, Diagonal Science, SOS, Four Candles, Drink and Drive, The Empty Page, Bobbie Peru and The Sandells. And to round it all off a brilliant Sunday party with The Ex, the most perfect anarchist band in the universe. Arnold sings, “Return to a state wherein strangers do not exist” and that sums up the experience of hearing The Ex. They make it seem like everyone in the room is a friend. I told Arnold and Terrie that after the gig and they seemed really pleased. I also told Terrie’s daughter Lena, who played a few songs before The Ex, that Terrie often looks like the happiest man in the world, and she said “He is.” The Ex always get me dancing but not as well as Miriam Ma Ve. It was all a lot of fun, and that’s what life is about. Islington Mill, Peer Hat, Soup Kitchen.”

This led to Lowri proposing that we collaborate on a facebook art project. At first I thought this was a joke but then events led to me starting a daily diary that I shared with her in the form of a public letter on facebook. Lowri contributed her facebook page whilst she was busy in Brazil, and I wrote a lot of words. The result was that I actually began to enjoy writing again, after quite a long spell of not being at all bothered with it. One day I was listening to “Happy House” by Siouxsie and the Banshees and the lyric “Looking through your window” jumped out at me as a title for the project. Lowri thought this was interesting, so that’s what it’s called. This is also quite relevant to me as the very first time I saw Lowri when her band Hotpants Romance played with the band I “sang” for (Cornish Tin Mines) I thought she looked like she could be Siouxsie Sioux’s much more beautiful younger sister. She doesn’t really look that much like Siouxsie, I was almost certainly drunk. Ceramic Hobs shouty man Simon Morris suggested I make all the letters into a book and call it “Namedropper” and I’d already thought about compiling them all into a fanzine and giving a copy to every friend mentioned. I’m far too lazy to do that and anyway there are enough objects cluttering up the world, so I decided to blog them all instead. The next fourteen posts on Pulsating Venus are all letters to Lowri. Letter fourteen was the last one sent as simultaneously my laptop died and Lowri decided it was time to end “Looking Through Your Window” as she needed her facebook space to promote her Sao Paolo  performance of “The Secret Life of You and Me.” Letter fifteen was never published. It now appears in all its gleeful anti-Trump glory. Letter sixteen would have been a review of The Breeders gig, but was never written. Letter seventeen would have been about Mr Airplane Man and Jeuce, however by this time I was so busy that I didn’t have time to write the diaries until days after events so it was a good place to stop. It was almost as if the Sun Ra film “Space is the Place” had fractured the illusion of time and a linear temporal progression had broken down. Lowri Evans has always been amusing, and now she has become a muse.