The Unstoppable Rise of Czech Oligarchs

 I couldn't sleep last night. I won't trouble you with why that is. This isn't that kind of blog. But I was tossing and turning between 4 and 5. That's the time our fears and anxieties bubble and percolate. Ask Shakespeare . 'To sleep perchance to dream.' You know where I'm coming from.  And where he was.

So I started texting ludicrous stream of consciousness gibberish to a friend who I knew would wake a couple of hours later, look at it in a cursory manner and go 'Oh it's him.' turn over and go back to sleep rather than thinking 'Right I've had enough. I'm blocking that bloody nutter.' That's what friends are for. Thanks Rachael !

And what was I writing about. Band names. Names of bands that you wish you'd been in. Imaginary narratives of  bands. Getting together falling in love and setting out with common or mistakenly disparate goals ,. Working songs up in garages and studios. Going out on the road together. Falling out. Breaking up and getting back together years later to find they stull didn't get on. Taking drugs !

There's a noble history of charting these alternative narratives of Rock & Roll. Any number of novels from Don DeLillo to Salman Rushdie. Kevin Sampson to  David Keenan. Amazon documentaries about bands where you think, 'oh that must be based on Fleetwood Mac'. Films about Frank Sidebottom with Michael Fassbinder in a paper mache head. 

So to The Unstoppable Rise of Czech Oligarchs. What d'you mean you've never heard of them? Not from Prague but from Staines. Reared on Joy Division,  Stereolab and Wire. Changed their names in thrall to Verlaine and Hell, Devoto and Shelley. Toured in dark red and blue button up shirts. Bought from Slater's.  OMD meet British Seapower. Suburban dreamers who should have gone for marketing careers instead like their mums suggested. .

Specialising in motorik rhythms and songs that  don't have choruses but do have long, meaningless but profound sounding titles. And lyrical plays at plays they'd never seen and actually knew virtually nothing about but talked about pretentiously at every opportunity. They changed their names to those of their heroes; Singer Eugene Ionesco, Guitarist Walter Benjamin, Bassist Rosa Luxembourg and drummer Josef Broz Tito. The slightly derailed drummer with the angular haircut . History mourns them !.