"The dark funk"

News from SWSL-endorsed Stourbridge "fuckabilly" mob The Pubic Fringe: henceforth they are to be known as Das Fringe, and their new demo - entitled The Misanthropic Sounds Of The Pubic Fringe - is available now. The demo comes accompanied by liner notes from the band's Director of Communications, retired Army officer and hubcap collector Captain Lazonby-Threpwell, which are perhaps the finest I've ever read.

Here, for instance, we find him reflecting on the circumstances he found himself in before first chancing upon the band: "In the summer of 1986, my life lay in utter ruins. My import-export business had self-destructed, largely due to a petty ban on the trade of live human skin. I was bankrupt and homeless, had not washed for six months and had developed a serious addiction to wood-glue and Ajax speedballs. To top it all, my live-in lover left me for a lathe operator from Bilston. I don’t mind admitting that I had drifted into a dark, aimless netherworld. My days were spent in a mindless haze, populated by false friends and invisible phantasms. I somehow imagined that I was being pursued through the streets and back alleys of Stourbridge by a medieval, time-travelling robot called Yohoshira. This horrifying, gothic future-machine whispered dark threats to me in a language I could barely recognise and I became trapped in a self-made vortex of confused paranoia and nausea".

If you thought The Libertines were incomparable self-mythologists, then read on and think again...