This could be my favourite photo of all time.

Found on Strange Maps. An annotated floor plan of 221B Baker St.

‘The floor plan was “drawn from notes taken while reading all 60 Sherlock Holmes stories twice in a row. If it appears in the books, it appears in this drawing,” says Mr Stutler.’

There’s a link to Russ’s site at the end of the article.

All tracks on the first cd are by Hammer legend James Bernard who liked to incorporate the syllables of the movie title into his soundtracks, so the main theme to Dracula went Daaaa . . . Duh . . . Dahhh and the theme to Taste The Blood Of Dracula went Daaa . . . Daaa . . . well, you get the idea. This first cd includes soundtrack excerpts from five Dracula titles, Frankenstein Created Woman, The Devil Rides Out and Kiss Of The Vampire.

Best of the bunch are probably Dracula, Taste The Blood Of Dracula and The Devil Rides Out (renamed The Devil’s Bride in the US because the distributor was worried that people would think it was a western).

The second cd is by Bernard and a variety of others. It has tracks from One Million Years B.C., Hands Of The Ripper and She amongst others. I’d have liked more of the Quatermass II soundtrack, and The Abominable Snowman – only the one minute thirty second main theme is present.

It should be noted that these aren’t the original recordings (some of which are available but becoming hard to track down on cd) but new recordings by The City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. For the most part they do a fine job and these new versions are almost indistinguishable from the originals. The Romance: The Young Lovers theme from Taste The Blood Of Dracula does sound quite different though and is not a patch on the original.

But that one small gripe aside, this is a great and readily available selection of Hammer’s best soundtracks and well worth a listen.

Here’s a one minute instrumental version of Neal Hefti’s Batman Theme recorded on a wet afternoon about four years ago. Me on bass, my brother Gerry on guitar, soulless robotic drum programme on drums.

There are five different bass tracks here, played in different positions on the neck and then doubled up, one in to each speaker to give it that weird sound. One of the bass tracks was distorted with an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedal, if memory serves.

[audio:http://www.paroneiria.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/01-batman-theme.mp3]

It took a couple of listens to get in to this one (so did the Grinderman album) but it’s growing on me.

However, there’s something about the 6^th track – We Call Upon The Author that makes my skin crawl, I can’t explain it, it really does make me a bit nauseous.

But fuck it, it’s a new Nick Cave album, and even it was just an audio recording of him shitting into a trumpet, it’d still be better than 99% of the dross that gets released.

Dave Evans emailed me last week to say that FQP have accepted my five page script, Bad Static, for publication in their horror title, Something Wicked.

I have a lot of respect for Dave and everyone at FQP, they work their arses off to put out three quality titles.

No word on who’ll be providing the art yet.

Steve Aylett’s biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Three random lines . . .

Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.

Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.

It is a masterpiece, worthy of the great man at it’s heart.

This is the cover to the UK edition.

Equus – Original Soundtrack

Music by Richard Rodney Bennett/Conducted by Angela Morley.

Equus has always been one of my favourite films, and not just because Jenny Agutter gets her kit off in it and literally rolls around in the hay. She did get her kit off a lot, didn’t she, Walkabout – that naked swimming scene, Equus – frisky in the stable, An American Werewolf In London – the saucy shower scene, she even got her knickers off in The Railway Children, well, bloomers, but it still counts.

But I digress, back to the record. I picked this up on ebay about four years ago for a few dollars. This is a really fucking brilliant soundtrack, full of sweeping violins and cellos (which remind me of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, in a fleeting, hard-to-pin-down kind of way).

Along with the main themes of the film it has six Richard Burton monologues in which he says things like . . .

“Afterwards, he says, they always embrace. The animal digs his sweaty brow into his cheek and they stand in the dark for an hour, like some necking couple. And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse, not the boy, the horse, and what it might be trying to do.”

and . . .

“Then, with a surgical skill that amazes even me, I fit in the knife and slice elegantly down to the navel, just like a seamstress following a pattern. I part the flaps, sever the inner tubes, yank them out and throw them, hot and steaming, on the floor. The other two then study the patterns, as if they’re reading hieroglyphics. It’s obvious to me that I’m tops as chief priest.”

Burton + monologues = Fuck me that’s fantastic!

Don’t think it’s out on cd, but well worth tracking down on the old vinyl.

So, a few weeks ago I mailed a six-page script over to Alan Grant in Scotland, he’s starting up a new comic called Wasted.

Alan has always been one of my favourite writers, particularly his work at 2000AD and on Batman. One of my favourite issues of his long stint on Batman was Detective Comics #583 which was co-written with John Wagner and illustrated by Norm Breyfogle. This issue not only included the first appearance of The Ventriloquist and Scarface but also had a brilliant cover by Mike Mignola.

Anyway, back to my script, Alan wrote back with a very encouraging letter pointing out a few problems and asking me to cut it down to four pages and try him again.

So, I did, and then he emailed me and said “Congratulations, this should look good in Wasted!” and I emailed him back saying “That’s great. You just made my day! Thank you very much,” and then I decided to celebrate but it was midweek and all my friends had work the next day and so I just got really drunk by myself.

I was in the local recycling centre yesterday and liberated this from the free book shelves. What kind of person would throw this away?

The dust jacket is a little tattered but apart from that it’s clean and brand new looking.

I could understand people throwing out really, really crappy books – and yet the shelves remain unburdened by the works of Dan Brown and Cecilia Ahern. Puzzling.