POSTCARDS FROM EWITFR...N - Manchester

I've been painting postcards. For reasons I explain HERE on the first blog which was London. I've also painted postcards for NOTTINGHAM, NORWICH, BRISTOL, and LEEDS. They have all been sold.

Manchester was the last UK show of the Everybody Was In The French Resistance...Now tour.

Here is the Postcard for Manchester.

I know its not very rock and roll to admit but I have a bad back. My bad back is probably due to a combination of all the jobs that I've had that have involved lifting heavy things and my (very rock and roll) lackadaisical attitude to health and safety procedures.

My bad back comes and goes. When its at its worst though I can't stand up straight, can barely walk and am in a lot of pain. It nearly ended the last Art Brut tour when, in Amsterdam, I had to be carried to hospital. Luckily they gave me lots and lots of powerful painkillers and I managed to hobble through the rest of the tour.

On the EWITFR...N tour my bad back had begun to slowly get worse. By Leeds I was worried that I was going to seize up again like I had in Amsterdam. Luckily though Dyan had been told a neat trick by her physiotherapist. Apparently if you have the sort of bad back that I get you can get a tennis ball, place it under your back in the problem area, lie on the ground and roll around forcing the ball into your back and this will help.

I was skeptical. But the promoter in Leeds had brought me a tennis ball (taken from his dog). I lied down on it and rolled around the floor. It really did help. I spent most of the day in Manchester rolling around on my back, on the tennis ball, in a three piece suit (optional) and by the time we came to play the show I was fixed.

I couldn't believe it. All the pain I've been in over the last five or six years all I'd needed to fix it was a fucking tennis ball.

Anyway the tennis ball saved the show and now I carry one everywhere I go. So I've decided to paint a tennis ball for Manchester, the final day of the UK tour and I wish I had known about their magic healing properties before.

The Manchester postcard is made of two 100% Cotton Canvases (4"x 6"), Acrylic Paint and Sharpie pen. I will fill in the back with what happened that day and add a stamp that I have also made to it. (I will post it to you in a proper envelope with real stamps though)

It is £35 plus postage. There is only one and I would prefer to sell it to someone who was at the show Manchester or really really wanted to be there You can contact me at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com

(I am not a Doctor. If you have a bad back. I advise you to seek a proper medical opinion)

Clever Clever Jazz

I have a pretentious Art Blog in which I'm attempting to make a painting for every song I've ever written. I sort of cheated this time and used one painting for two songs.

Those two songs are Skin Flick and Charity Shop by my old band Future And The Boy.

I think with Skin Flick I was trying to write lyrics like the Yummy Fur and Charity Shop was based around a short story I had written about a man finding all his possessions in a charity shop and then realising he was dead.

These songs are being released by Filthy Little Angel off shoot Leaving Home Records. They have pressed 200 of them and they are available HERE for £4 from April 5th (I think you can pre-order)

My pretentious art blog is HERE. It has paintings for sale and a story about my old band The Art Goblins.

POSTCARDS FROM EBWITFR...N -Leeds

I've been painting postcards. For reasons I explain HERE on the first blog which was London. I've also painted postcards for NOTTINGHAM, NORWICH and BRISTOL. They have all been sold.

Here is the Postcard for Leeds

Leeds was the fifth show of the UK tour and for this one we had Internet Forever with us instead of the Lovely Eggs. Despite Internet Forever being brilliant, I did miss the Lovely Eggs a little bit. Mainly because I'd spent most of the night before drinking and playing table football with them and wanted a rematch because I'd lost.

After our show at the Thekla we'd gone to a place called the Lanes to watch Tender Trap. Which is where I was beaten by The Lovely Eggs at table football. My friend Matt Biscuit from The Art Goblins had also come out for the evening and he beat me at bowling. Now I shouldn't have really been bowling as I had a bad back. I was full of booze though and felt invincible.

The next day waking up in the Bristol hotel room I could barely walk. I was bent double, I looked like a question mark. I was terrified that we wouldn't be able to play the show in Leeds. It took me nearly an hour to get dressed and then Dyan had to carry me out to the van. I'd suffered from a bad back like this before and knew that it usually gets worse before it gets better. Instead of sitting in one of the vans seats I lay completely flat on my back on the floor for the entire trip to Leeds.

Leeds is quite a long way from Bristol so we stopped at a service station half way for lunch.It took me ages to climb out of the van. In the end I had to slide out slowly on my back with my groin raised high in the air. I slowly inched my way out with my three piece suit riding up around my waist, swearing loudly to myself and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. It wasn't till I'd managed to get out of the van that I noticed that in the car parked directly next to us there was a family eating sandwiches staring in at me. I'm suprised they didn't phone the police.

I thought about painting me sliding out of the van on my back for the postcard as a kind of play on the way female popstars have to learn how to get out of limousines in short dresses. The image is still too painful for me though and would look more than a little vulgar.

Anyway we got to the Brudenell Social club fine. I was suprised as it turned out to be a proper social club with tables and seating. The sort that I used to go to with my grandad. Its an amazing venue.

Luckily as I do a lot less jumping and kicking in EITFR...N then I do in Art Brut, I managed to play the show. Although with we me hanging off the microphone stand and everybody sitting down at tables it did give it a kind of cabaret feel.

From my experience with my back, I knew it was only going to get worse and was worried about the next show in Manchester. The promoter gave me something though that cured my back and saved the show in Manchester. I'll paint it for the Manchester postcard.

My Leeds postcard is made of two 4"x6" 100% cotton canvases, acrylic paint and sharpie pen. It costs £35. If you buy it I will fill the back in with pen and add a stamp that I have also made.

I will post it to you in a proper envelope though.

I can be contacted at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com

POSTCARDS FROM EBWITFR...N - Bristol

I am making a postcard for every show Everybody Was In The French Resistance...Now played on our UK tour. This is my 4th Postcard. The first three are Here, Here and Here. They have all been sold.

Here is the fourth postcard it is for Bristol

Bristol was the 4th day of our tour and the third with the Lovely Eggs. By now they were pretty much my favourite band.

I'd been to the Thekla before a number of times. I'd never played it before though and I was really excited to finally be given the chance.

Dyan had played here previously with her main band The Blood Arm.

The night The Blood Arm played the Thekla their singer Nathaniel had made the crowd run from one side of the boat to the other making it violently rock from side to side. We found out when we played there that the manager who had been working in the office that night didn't know how to swim and as the boat started swaying feared for his life. Being shift manager of the Thekla is presumably the same as being the captain of the Thekla. So he would be expected to go down with his ship.

Anyway, I was excited about finally getting to play the Thekla as I'm a big fan of Vivian Stanshall and he used to live on it.

In 1982 the novelist Ki Longfellow-Stanshall who was married to Vivian had the idea of buying a huge boat and using it to stage poetry events, cabaret, musicals, live music and plays. The Thekla was found in the half abandoned docks in Sunderland and was perfect for the job. The Thekla had been a german boat used too carry timber and her hull was vast, clean, open and lined with a very hard wood. It was sailed down to Bristol harbour and renamed The Old Profanity Show Boat and although its name has since returned to the Thekla is still docked in the same place today.

You can read more about it HERE on wikipedia.

From the research I've done (mainly wikipedia) I've worked out Vivian, Ki and their daughter lived on the boat for, I think, three years.

For an English Heritage blue plaque to commemorate the link between a location and a famous person. The famous person has to have been dead for twenty years. We're five years off of that for Vivian Stanshall. My postcard is of the plaque Im presuming will be going up in five years time.

Vivian Stanshall is often described as a "great British eccentric" He didn't like this label though and insisted he was just being himself.

This postcard is made of two 100% Cotton canvasses (6"x4"), a sharpie pen and some acrylic paint.

If you buy it. I will fill the back in with what happened that day, add a stamp that I have also made and then stick it in an envelope with a real stamp and send it to you.

It is £35 plus postage. There is only one. You can contact me at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com

POSTCARDS FROM EWITFR...N - Norwich

This is the third postcard I've made. The other two are HERE and HERE. They have both been sold.

Here is the Postcard for Norwich

Norwich was the third day of the tour and our second with The Lovely Eggs. There was also a local band called the Grenouilles that played too.

I liked the Grenouilles a lot, but they were a bit of a peculiar band. They played very melodramatic chamber pop songs and then in between the songs they would tell jokes about cheese.

So you would have a powerful emotive song played on the violin and then

"What did the cheese say when he looked in the mirror?......Halloumi"

and then another dark acoustic song followed by

"What do you call a Cheese that doesn't belong to you?....Nacho Cheese"

A haunting wistful sad song was followed by

"How does a welsh man eat cheese when he is sat on the edge of a cliff?... Caerphilly"

It was a very enjoyable set.

The Lovely Eggs love Cheese and have a couple of songs about how much they love it. They had been talking about their love of cheese the night before and mentioned that they have a song about cheese that is so rude they never play it live in case their parents find out. It is about Garstung Blue. They played it in Norwich for the Grenouilles. It was quite rude. I've been looking for it online to link to it. But the song is so rude it must get taken down from the internet whenever it is posted.

The Norwich Postcard is made of two 100% Cotton Canvases (4"x 6"), Acrylic Paint and Sharpie pen. I will fill in the back with what happened that day and add a stamp that I have also made to it. (I will post it to you in a proper envelope with real stamps though)

It is £35 plus postage. And I would prefer to sell it to someone who was in Norwich or really really wanted to be there You can contact me at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com

POSTCARDS FROM EWITFR...N - Nottingham

I wrote yesterday about why I'm making postcards. The London one is still available.

This is the postcard from Nottingham.

Nottingham was the second day of the tour and our first day with the brilliant Lovely Eggs.

We played quite an early show as there was a club night afterwards. Towards the end of our set, out of the corner of my eye, I could see a man with some inflatable bananas impatiently waiting for us to finish. This was confusing. As it was their first night with us The Lovely Eggs thought it might have been part of our set and that we were about to reply to a banana based song. Maybe Bananas in Pyjamas or Yes, We Have No Bananas. We weren't though unfortunately as yet there are no banana based songs in our set.

The second we left the stage the man with the bananas sprung into action and hung them in the middle of the room. I don't know much about Nottingham. I'd like to think though that it is full of surrealist artists who go to all the gigs and review them in an unusual way and that someone hanging a huge pair of inflatable bananas in the middle of the room immediately after you've just played is a massive compliment. I asked all the drunk students turning up to the club afterwards if this was the case, but they just looked at me like I was mental.

My Nottingham Postcard is made of two 4"x6" 100% Cotton Canvases, Acrylic Paint and Sharpie Pen.

I am only making one postcard for each place we played. I would prefer it if you were at the gig. But I will also sell it to you if you really wanted to be there. I will fill in the back with what happened that day address it to you and add a stamp from the stamp book I've just made.

Don't worry though when I send you the two canvases I will put them into an envelope and use real stamps.

My Postcards are £35 plus postage. You can email me at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com.

POSTCARDS FROM EWITFR...N

I have a bit of an obsession with Postcards. On my other blog about painting two of the paintings are already of postcards. And as I very rarely update it, that comes to 50% of the blog.

I'm not sure what it is I like about Postcards. Part of it is definitely how antiquated they now feel. The idea of buying a photo, writing on the back, buying a stamp and then finding a post box to put it in does seem like a lot of effort in an age where we can take photos with our phones add some text and then send them to our loved ones at the push of a button.

Because of this the role of the postcard has changed it is now something we buy for ourselves from museum gift shops to blu-tac to our walls or stick to our fridges with magnets to let our friends know all the exciting places we've been and fantastic things we have seen.

Nowadays when a postcard is received I believe it has a far more personal touch than it has ever had before.

I have made a postcard for every date Everybody Was In The French Resistance...Now played on the UK leg of our tour.

Here is the first one it is for London.

They are made of 2 quality 100% cotton canvases (4"x 6"), acrylic paint and sharpie pen.

I'm only making one for each show. If you buy it I will fill in the back with what happened that day. I've also made some stamps to attach and I'll fill in the address.

I will use real stamps and an envelope to send them to you though.

My postcards are both personal and something to stick on your wall to show your friends the fantastic places you have been (the venue we played) and the amazing things you have seen (us)

My postcards cost £35 plus postage. They are only for people who were actually at the gig or really, really intended to be.

A review of the London gig is HERE

If you would like to buy the postcard you can email at eddie.argos.resource@gmail.com

I will be putting up the Nottingham postcard later tonight.