still in sheffield, leave soon for the final stretch… i have gotten a few questions and comments about the frankie/nigel situation… so i guess now that the hall of fame is imminent again; no one in the band ever had any hard feelings towards those guys until they decided to try and sue us which was such a huge pain and trauma you cant imagine… (sigh!) the band was started by debbie and myself back in 73-75 or so depending on how you mark the time line… there were numerous other shifting band members before we gained any notoriety… the line up was made stable and the name first used after we got clem and a little later jimmy, blondie was well established when those guys joined, frankie was replaced by eddie martinez for the last year or so… so years later when we decided to start up again we briefly tried to work with nigel but by that time we had been working with leigh foxx for a long time and were closer to him… i dont think i need to justify who i want to work with but there is a rigidity in people about the identity of “the band”, what peoples perception of it is, what they think it should be etc (there must have been volumes written about the beatles and yoko etc, we still argue about what version of the stones was the best one) so thats kind of it… what happened then was that in spite of those guys getting paid their share for the work they did (despite what you might see they get and always have gotten a percentage of the royalties for the albums they worked on) they decided that they wanted to get a percentage of everything the band made even if they werent involved and we all felt that that wasnt fair… now all of this has nothing to do with musicianship etc but i swear that speaking for myself if debbie and the others didnt want to work with me any more i would feel bad about it certainly but i would let it go, you can believe it or not… i know this is gonna come up more but thats my side of it those guys could have remained on friendly terms with us but the way i see it they chose not to… im not gonna get into who contributed what to the band and the band identity thats up to the public perception… i really didnt want to write this shit it just stirs up a lot of bad feelings… on a lighter now being stuck in hotel rooms one is forced to watch the occasional miserable tv show, generally i avoid tv shows but i left my murakami book on the bus and as a result succumbed to the lure of the crummy tub(e)… so i watched ‘lost’ which is kind of survivor with flashbacks and shittier writing… so these guys are slogging through the jungle after not being able to break into some mysterious bomb shelter, some subplot about kidney theft, so the one guy has a dream of a plane crashing and he knows they have to find it so they slog through the jungle and sure enough they find the plane and they are all excited and the guy goes inside and damn! whats there?, shit shit nothing but heroin… they are very upset… either i’m crazy or this is the straight line of the year; the dudes are on a deserted tropical island with a bunch of babes and a lifetime supply of smack and they are pissed off… as kevin said ‘all they need is some boom boxes’… then theres king kong which always struck me as an overwhelming tragedy, the saddest fucking story; is it about conservation?, about the human tendency to exploit and ruin everything man comes into contact within the natural world, is it about loneliness and isolation? what a strange message to put out at christmas… im sure i’ll probably like it when i get around to it but i always felt so miserably sorry for poor kong that i couldnt really get into the movie that much… (also i’m amazed that so many of the people over here when discussing the new version in print and on tv say they are unfamiliar with the original old version which i’d always thought was required viewing) shouldnt have killed tookie (elvis not dead, living in a corn field)