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pavementlicker.com weareshadows.com joshjoshjones.co.uk CONTACT
mail@pavementlicker.com CONTRIBUTORS
1 - Front Cover 2 - We Are Shadows 3 - Marco Bevilacqua 4 - We Are Shadows 5 - We Are Shadows 6 - Daniel David Freeman 7 - Daniel Rhatigan 8 - Brook Power 9 - We Are Shadows 10 - GILF 11 - Natasha Gornik 12 - Patrick Donahue 13 - Danny Sangra 14 - Santiago Calderón García 15 - Tom Medwell 16 - We Are Shadows 17 - Cane Morto 18 - Paul Sethi 19 - Sarah A King 20 - We Are Shadows 21 - Lynn Golan 22 - Josh Jones 23 - Dan at Hero Of Switzerland 24 - Paul Sargent 25 - Andreas Laszlo Konrath 26 - Emmy The Great 27 - Emmy The Great 28 - Anthony Lister 29 - Hannah Baxter 30 - Pavement Licker 31 - Kelsey Brookes 32 - Lon Wenger 33 - Paul Camo 34 - We Are Shadows 35 - Michael Simpson 36 - HLFSTR:4332 37 - Chrysa Koukoura 38 Ray Kane 39 - RUN 40 - Jon Burgerman 41 - Dan Wilton 42 - Jake Jones 43 - Eli Flannagan 44 - LMK Berry 45 - Andrew Rae 46 - 47 - Pure Evil 48 - We Are Shadows 49 - Michele Guidarini 50 - John Slade 51 - Alex Zareba 52 - We Are Shadows Special thanks to James-Lee Duffy, Josh Jones, JT and Jarballs Printers for making it happen.
© PAVEMENT LICKER 2014
WHODUNWHAT? When Detective Rasson arrived at the downstairs flat, he nodded at the officer guarding the scene outside the building and was let under the police tape. His partner - Baines - was already there, leaning on the jamb of the internal door. “It’s a new one on me boss,” he said cheerily and jerked his thumb in the direction of the front room. Two guys and a girl were in the middle of the forensic photoshoot, faces pale, the life drained out of them hours earlier. The guys side by side on the sofa, the girl on a chair across the room. She had her feet tucked up under her as if she was cold and the guy on the right had his foot resting on the coffee table in front of him. They all had their coats on and they all had matching blue lips, which reflected almost neon with each flash of the pathologist’s camera. Two empty lottery tickets were in the room. One on the coffee table and one on the floor directly below the hand of the guy nearest Rasson. It had obviously been dropped there. Both of the tickets had been folded and unfolded, deep creases in the paper had made them furl up at the edges like flowers. “It probably floated to the floor when he stopped breathing,” reasoned Rasson. Squatting down to have a closer look he poked the ticket with his tweezers and noticed some markings inside. It was a sentence. And it was written in the style of a claw-handed cripple. The scrawled note simply said: “We didn’t fuck the rabbit”
JOE STRUMMER SUMMER When I was 17, I got involved with a much older man I met at a Joe Strummer concert. He was a friend of Joe’s, and I was a friend of Joe’s daughter, Jazz, which means that the first thing I remember Joe Strummer saying to me was, “Be careful.” That was November 2001. The summer that followed, on the day I finished my A-levels, I got a voicemail on my Nokia 6200. It was the man - let’s call him the DJ - asking if I wanted to go to Glastonbury for free. I bailed on the school camping trip that my friends had planned for the end of exams, and hopped on a train to Somerset, carrying nothing but a pair of wellies, a bag of clothes and two large bottles of Strongbow that the grownups (as I called them) had requested. I often wonder to myself what would have happened if, in the Choose Your Own Adventure of my life, I had said no. If I had stuck to my plan to spend the weekend on the Sussex Downs with my boyfriend and our pals. Within three days of the phone call I was ‘married’ to the DJ, having presumably said ‘yes’ at some point in the hazy intersection between Friday and Saturday, as we walked past an inflatable chapel. Within a month, still his ‘wife’, I was in Japan at the Fuji Rock festival, playing a small but memorable role in the entourage that surrounded Joe Strummer in the final festival season of his life. From my vantage point as a teenager orbiting the furthest point of his solar system, I worked out a few things about Joe. I worked out that his presence at festivals was legendary. Him being there was a thing. I worked out that he collected the flags of countries, which travelled with him and were draped around his campfires: Jamaica, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan, Sweden... I decided that he collected people, saw good in them where others couldn’t, and that people - all people - saw something in him. Having just completed an A-level module in English Medieval Literature, it did not pass me by that Joe’s special relationship with Somerset, where he lived, and Glastonbury, where he held court in the midst of a circle of old sofas, made him the chief of an early 21st-century Camelot. That summer, I suggested to my friend that her dad was the reincarnation of King Arthur. My first Glastonbury, with the DJ and the Strummer entourage (including Keith Allen, who seemed distantly amused by my escapades) was both memorable and not. I just discovered whilst checking for this piece that my favourite band of the time, Garbage, headlined. Fuji Rock though, a much cleaner experience thanks to international air travel restrictions, I will never forget. It became my express goal, after getting over the initial shock of a Japanese talking toilet, to avoid the DJ at all costs, making it back to the campsite for stealthy booze pickups, and to the hotel for sleep only when I knew he was out in the festival. It was a thrilling, overseas game of hide and seek. I spent four days with my friend’s little sister Lola, and a
band called the Get Up Kids. The bands we watched were the big bands of the time – Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Spiritualized, White Stripes, Primal Scream - bands that still bring up a weird kind of loyalty in me that, when I think about it, is really a loyalty to myself. Instant blood brothers with the Get Up Kids, Lola and I never found a chance to test our theory that we were at the festival as groupies, but that summer that I could have been one, I knew instantly that I would rather be on stage, than at the perimeter drinking the rider and wondering how it felt. The Get Up Kids left on Sunday, and we asked if we would see them again next year. They said, “You should start a band so you can come back.” So we did. We both still make music now. Fuji Rock also offered a small redemption from my first interaction with Joe - that warning in the corridor between the Brixton Academy dressing rooms. Driving back to the airport in a courtesy van, we all sang ‘Alligato’ to the tune of Elvis’ ‘In the Ghetto’, and drank the last of the alcohol. The last thing Joe ever said to me, ever, ever, was, “I like you,” tears rolling down his cheeks because we were eaving Japan. When Joe passed away that December, I grieved for my friends and their loss, and for the sweet, extraordinary man whose light had shone on me for that brief moment. The night before the news broke, sleepless in the house I shared with his daughter, I wrote him a letter on a school issue laptop promising that I would be there for her. I let the laptop go, but not the promise, and every time I make a decision as a musician, I try to remember a few things that I picked up from my first glimpses of the music industry. See the good in people. Be the centre of a universe. For a long time I tried not to tell anyone about the origins of my musical ambitions. It felt like it was part of my friends’ private family experience, and I didn’t want to be trading on it in any way. But twelve years have gone by now, and two years ago they threw a festival to mark the first decade since his death. Joe’s campfires live on via their family charity, Strummerville, and his legacy lives on in all the ways that you know. It feels OK to talk about now. The last time I played Glastonbury, a security guard came over and said my husband was waiting for me out front, and I knew exactly who he meant. Me and the DJ joke about getting divorced some day, but actually I kind of like having a Glastonbury husband, and I’ll always be grateful to him for throwing me into a world that eventually became mine.
WASHING MACHINE A washing machine scrapes and crashes into a diner on some dead stretch of highway in the nowhere heartlands of America and, with a pair of blue jeans and white t-shirt rising and falling inside the drum, coo coos to the pretty waitress and orders a cherry soda. “You wanna get outta here?” it bleeps at her, “we can go anywhere - anywhere at all.” Wiping clean the penny lick, she raises her eyebrow and gives it a curious look. “Something tells me I’m not the first girl you’ve said that to.” “Girl,” it bleeps, “once you’ve been out there, you know you’ve been someplace.” Her eyes drift out the window, onto the empty road, the horizon just hanging there, blue and red and beyond, just holding that pose. Her voice cracks. She bursts into laughter. She shakes herself from the daydream. “You’ve said that same thing to every girl you never even met,” “Uhu,” it bleeps, but she’s gathered herself fully now, “and you’re lying every god damn time.” It pauses. The green and red lights do a little twirl. “Girl,” it murmurs. “I’m the washing machine.”
NEIGHBOURS (NOT AUSTRALIAN) Late at night, I think about murder. I think about death. I think about killing. I think about my neighbour and his murder, death and killing. I think about MURDERING my neighbour. The DEATH of my neighbour. KILLING my neighbour. I think about using a pillow. Wait. I think about it while I lie on my pillow. I think about vaulting his crumbling back wall while he’s out shout-smoking and unleashing some sort of devastating, Sagat-from-Street-Fighter-2-Turbo-style-tiger uppercut that knocks him back over his idiot house, startling him into a higher state of consciousness. I think about how he’ll be dazzled into such a transcendental fug that he’ll just start walking and walking and walking in a desperate effort to gain some understanding of his solely shout and smoke based existence, and how he won’t stop, he won’t stop until his body vaporizes all vital salts and sugars, and he stumbles, COLLAPSES into… into a puddle of SHIT, dog, umm, cow, no, no… HUMAN SHIT AND CIGARETTE BUTTS! Ha ha ha ha ha! Haaaaaa! Bah hah hah! He was really noisy again last night. I shouted out the window. He shouted something back. Not sure what. Couldn’t really hear him clearly…
WHO AM I? I was born in 1923 I think I am a butterfly on a slide I don’t like Francis I am terrified of eggs I sometimes hop, skip but never jump I have a furry inside edge I am Henry Kelly.
STICK YOUR FINGERS IN YOUR EARS AND GO LA LA LA SHUT YOUR EYES AND HUM PUT A FILTER ON YOUR BRAIN AND KEEP YOURSELF ON THE SAFE SIDE OF DUMB PROCESS INFORMATION IN THE THIRD PERSON REST ASSURED WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK DON’T WORRY KEEP CALM BE HAPPY DON’T PANIC YOU ARE THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE YOU ARE EXEMPT YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME YOU ARE FULLY INSURED IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER PLACATE YOURSELF EVERYTHING IS FINE LA LA LA.