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Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19
The stars encourage you to continue treating your body like it is a temple. However, they also encourage you to switch to a religion that doesn’t worship rich, creamy cheesecake.
Taurus Apr 20 - May 20
You live in constant dread that your girlfriend will uncover your secret shame. That’s just plain silly, though, as she has no idea where you buried the other seven nurses before her.
Gemini May 21 - Jun 21
The uncontrollable rage you harbour will once again transform your baked potato into a plate of mashed potatoes.
Cancer Jun 22 - Jul 22
Taurus the Bull rising through Uranus this month is going to leave you with one hell of a sore arse.
Leo Jul 23 - Aug 22
Avoid confrontation at work this week. Plan your attack well ahead of time so your boss doesn’t realize until it’s too late that you’re sneaking up behind him to brain him with the coffee maker.
Virgo Aug 23 - Sep 22
It’s strange the things we do for love, which for you means yet another midnight tryst to the local pig farm.
Libra Sep 23 - Oct 23
The disarming smile that you pride yourself upon will do you little good in disarming the bomb waiting for you to open the car door.
Scorpio Oct 24 - Nov 21
Go ahead and have another doughnut. The doughnut will never judge you then leave you.
Sagittarius Nov 22 - Dec 21
Sitting on high upon the throne you built from the skulls of your enemies won’t stop people from continuing to laugh at you, considering it doesn’t take much to snap the necks of a few thousand parakeets.
Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19
You are typically emotionally closed off and it might be difficult for you to conjure the sentiment, but try to be happy for the excited young boys who will find your soggy, decapitated body floating in the old quarry next week.
Aquarius Jan 20 - Feb 18
Although you’re not usually the sentimental type, you will nonetheless be moved to tears this week by a routine colonoscopy gone horribly wrong.
Pisces Feb 19 - Mar 20
The stars remind you that if you continue to be unimpressed with your lover, true sexual satisfaction is always within arm’s reach for you.
Cover Art for Madness’ “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”
Book Cover for Peter Ackroyd’s “Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem”
Says Jon Young (who ferreted out the graphical parallel):
“It looks to me as both carrying on the Madness tradition of album cover shadows like the Our House album and referencing a book that influenced the title track on the album making a Madness-like version of it.”
Are the two connected, did Madness nick the idea from Peter Akroyd, are they setting themselves up to be sued again like they were with the Madstock album cover art? You be the judge. You know you like to judge.
(And before you start debating the bichromatic nature of the blog entry title, I’m only kidding about it being a rip off - it’s all media sensationalism to lure you into reading the blog!)
From Tarotologist Esteban Bringerez & Astromysticist Kevinium Tizzardi
Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19
Your faith in mankind is renewed when you see a homeless man jump into a frozen pond to save a drowning dog. You choose to ignore when the dog goes straight from the water to the barbecue.
Taurus Apr 20 - May 20
It’s a good time to work on your crippled self-esteem, you worthless soggy pile of buffalo squeeze.
Gemini May 21 - Jun 21
You’ll do well to recognize there are only two types of people in life: Those who agree with everything you say without question and drunk Irishmen.
Cancer Jun 22 - Jul 22
You are oft accused of being wholly incapable of loving anyone or anything, but they forget legless sheep that can’t run away.
Leo Jul 23 - Aug 22
Sure, the truth may set you free, but sometimes it lands you a life sentence for brutally butchering the town minister.
Virgo Aug 23 - Sep 22
The stars are wondering if you’ve ever talked to a woman without having to give your credit card number first.
Libra Sep 23 - Oct 23
You don’t know what hurts more: Your ex-spouse’s restraining order keeping you at least fifty feet away at all times, or the 4000 watt tazer that reaches exactly fifty feet.
Scorpio Oct 24 - Nov 21
To your criminal chagrin, you’ll learn there is no age-old adage saying how to effectively dispose of the baby after the bathwater.
Sagittarius Nov 22 - Dec 21
There will always be laughter in your life, except when you turn around to see what the hell is so damned funny.
Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19
If your current romantic relationship is crushing your very spirit, leaving you feeling battered and bruised, don’t go blaming yourself. You didn’t really get to choose your cell mate.
Aquarius Jan 20 - Feb 18
It is said madness is all in the mind, but ever since you lost your bottle of lithium, the tiny ballerina fur seal that lives inside your nose keeps telling you that madness instead resides entirely within Michael Caine’s spleen. Barring any evidence to the contrary, you are inclined to agree.
Pisces Feb 19 - Mar 20
Fortune will smile upon you this week, but it’ll be in that crappy, smug, self-satisfied way that Fortune gets when it knows something you don’t and refuses to tell you.
Why is it that the kids today seem so complacent about the government & the bankers who have fucked up this country? What we need is a reaction & it isn’t happening.
Is it because surviving on credit has provided a nice easy cushion for everyone over the last 20 years so there is no desire to react against it? There is a storm coming & when people run out of money, credit, beer, clothes, food, housing & lose their jobs will the students & the kids unite & do something?
Where are the great bands that always emerge in these situations in history, protesting & making a point? I can’t see them yet & that is sad. Why is it that my band “I Ludicrous” who have been around for 25 years is still writing interesting observational lyrics protesting against the crap that society is presenting us now? Where are the riots, the gigs, the songs & the souls of people who want to make a serious point? In 2 years time it will all be too late.
Formed in 1997 in Glasgow, shortly after two scooterboys, singer Stan, and bass player, Gordy, saw a shit-awful Madness tribute band at the Southport Scooter Rally, and got thrown out of the hall for shouting abuse at them.
“That is NOT the right bassline to House of FUN!! You fudging currant” and similar.
Annoyed that, by the mid 1990s, the wondrous energy and wit of 2-Tone had been reduced to a sad parade of covers bands and cardboard pork pie nostalgia, Stan and Gordy resolved to start a band that could write and play some NEW tunes that tapped into the bouncing soul of 2-Tone, without just being warmed-up leftovers.
First recruit was Joel Gray, who just happened to be the barman in the very pub where Stan and Gordy were sitting getting pissed and hatching this plan. (The 13th Note, Glassford St)
He had previously drummed for Capone and the Bullets, a multi-racial Glasgow ska outfit that had been in the second-wave of 2-tone, and completely dynamite live, but which had split acrimoniously whilst recording a debut LP (with funding lent by Bad Manners’ Buster Bloodvessel)
Joel was missing his sticks, and was right up for another crack at the big time.
Second recruit was Alex Huntley, a skinny Geordie who had already made a name for himself organising gigs in Glasgow, and playing in various indie bands. He worshipped Jerry Dammers and liked writing “dark songs that sounded cheerful” and was straight in on keyboards.
Jane Chalmers, tiny bass player in all-girl punk trio, Pink Kross, had often expressed an urge to do some ska, so was drafted in to do girl vocals….. and shaved her head specially….
Soon after, Jenny Divers, of Jane’s brother’s Europe-touring crusty punk band Ex-Cathedra, arrived on saxophone.
Word was, by now, spreading that some hi-jinks were afoot.
Mick Cooke, of sensitive indie balladeers, Belle and Sebastian, got in touch through Alex to confess that he loved ska and wanted to join the brass section on trumpet.
Gordy and Stan’s old pal, Rat, confessed that he hated ska, but saw the potential party forming, and joined up to play lead guitar, taking the Roddy Radiation angle of if you cant beat ‘em, join ‘em - then beat ‘em.
After several months of drunken practices, that line-up first appeared at a benefit for striking miners, bottom of the bill - but the two bands on after us knew they were onto a loser, as the crowd continued to shout for us to come back on throughout their sets.
That first set, if memory serves right, was mainly covers… The Bar-Kays ‘Last Night’, The Specials ‘Stupid Marriage’, The Pietasters ‘Girl Take It Easy’, The Damned’s ‘Love Song’ and a shambolic stagger through the classic ‘54-46 (was my number)’. However, there were already two songs of our own in the set, the Morricone-inspired “Tales of the Arizona Highway Patrol” and a completely silly eastern european knees-up called ‘Mo’Ska’. These went down very well, and we felt from that moment that we could write more and quickly do away with the cover versions.
More gigs followed into the winetr of 1997, as word spread that there was, for the first time in many years in Glasgow, a band playing stuff you could jump around to.
Soon, Lindsey Watson, a long-time Pink Kross groupie, turned up at a practice to TELL us she was going to join as trombonist. Several months later, she actually took her trombone out of its case and we started to believe her.
And finally, Helen Lloyd, Alex’s girlfriend at the time, was seeing so much of us all, what with practices round her and Alex’s flat every week, that she asked if she could maybe learn some of the keyboard bits, just in case Alex couldn’t make it along one night.
We were off to a flying start…
we started writing and recording our own songs
“Around the World…” our first single, was released on Scottish indie label F&J in 1998
A double A-side of “Arizona Highway Patrol” and “Mo’Ska”, it was recorded by an enthusiastic friend, rather than anyone with any experience of recording, and didn’t sound nearly as good as we did live… but we sold lots of regardless.
“Last Night” our second single, worked out a lot better, and got played on the radio, sold out its first pressing, and then got picked up and re-released by German ska label PuffOtterPlatten (later renamed RatRaceRecords as it moved from punk to ska releases)
That got us some serious gigs…. most notably the T in the Park festival 1999, where we opened the main stage, just ahead of Joe Strummer’s Mescaleroes, The Stereophonics, the Beautiful South and Blur. We took our own soundman on the day, and were told afterwards that, of all the day’s bands, we had been the one to most consistently exceed the noise limits imposed by the local council.
another single followed…. “Whisky”….
Actually a split single - ‘Treaty at Harthill” with our Edinburgh ska-punk pals and labelmates The Newtown Grunts, with which we were playing a lot of gigs, and working up our own wee scene of skinheads, scooterboys, crusties and students.
Harthill is the grim service statiion halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Then came our first album, “Right Line In Nylons” recorded in a damp studio in Glasgow’s Maryhill, on a budget of f**k all, half of which was spent on fags and cider. But it turned out pretty well, if a wee bit FAST in places.
It sold out its first 1000 CD pressing, then its second, and its third, then got released on lovely vinyl in Europe by RatRaceRecords, who by that time were organising jaunts for us to go to the continent to play to its huge ska crowd
As the century turned, we were much in demand live…. Glasgow’s famous King Tuts had us in to do their Millennium celebrations…. we stole a trick from King Kurt and split the set to offer the audience ‘New Century-New Haircut’, and set up temporary barber’s chairs on stage, with band members wielding electric clippers and scissors to anyone willing to be sacrificed. I personally cut ponytails off two big chaps, who maybe wouldn’t have done it were they not pissed.
Tours abroad and sell-out gigs at home continued through 2001, but we hit a songwriting block, and by 2002, were well and truly in a rut, banging out five-year-old songs and getting pissed off with it. But fate intervened…
In the space of a year, 2002 into 2003, Jenny sax fulfilled her longstanding ambition to travel the world (she ended up marrying an Australian), Rat finally got a job, running a pub, and needed his sleep, and finally, Alex, who had always been a singer at heart, struck gold with his side project, Franz Ferdinand, and apologetically left, not just to travel the world, but to take over large chunks of it.
These departures, all amicable and marked by a variety of parties and farewell events, were a useful kick up the arse… we recruited young saxophone genius James Swinbourne to fill the gap in the brass, and got old pal John Disco (who had earned his musical wings as a 14 year old, appearing on Top of The Pops with teen rrriot outfit Bis) as guitarist. John was also a huge ska fan (particularly The Beat) and with him onboard, songs suddenly started flowing again.
Shortly after he joined, Yank ska-punks Rancid invited us to support them over two nights at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom, and we found ourselves playing to thousands of wee teenie-punks who, quite possibly, had never seen a brass section in their life. Those gigs were a huge success – and we were revived.
Our first new single in several years followed shortly after… ‘Say Something Special’…. a bitter rant at some of the skinheads we had met both in the UK and overseas, who had professed to be Specials fans, but had also revealed a taste for right wing politics. How the f**k can you be a Specials fan AND a Nazi, you twats?
The single was another sell-out success, and again we got radio play, and invites to play all sorts of strange gigs, many of which we happily took. We also filmed our first proper video, borrowing liberally from the Big Madness Book of cheap video trickery….
We got to work recording our second LP, and released a second single from the new batch of songs, “Hand of God”, which has since become a bit of an anthem for Scottish football’s notorious Tartan Army (which we were rather hoping it would)
Finishing the LP it took a while, again cos we were basically begging and borrowing studio time and equipment, and only paying for stuff when a particularly tasty gig had left us with some spare… but there wasn’t really a rush anyway, and all the time spent wasn’t wasted. When “Now! That’s What I Call… the Amphetameanies” finally came out in 2006, the reviews we got were fantastic, and it quickly sold out its first pressing on CD, and needed repressed on vinyl.
Do The Dog (December 2006)
“Charging out of Glasgow with a corking 2nd album are long running 9-piece juggernaut The Amphetameanies. Titled “Now! That¹s What I Call … The Amphetameanies”, the 14-song disc is a riotous party of soul-injected 2-Tone from start to finish.
Echoes of Madness, Blondie, The Specials and Dexys Midnight Runners can be heard on the release, all injected with the band’s unique sense of humour and knack for writing top quality pop tunes. Yet another contender for album of the year in an extraordinary 12 months for UK ska!
(Kev Flowerdew)
End of last year, we wanted to release another song off “Now! That’s…” to give us another shot at getting it on the radio, and win ourselves a few more friends.
“Goodbye Boyfriend” was picked, but to ensure value for money for long-suffering fans who had already bought two singles off the LP, we put it out on an EP with three brand new tracks.
A video for that song is now in the works… in fact, I’ll be getting square eyes editing the sod this weekend.
Meanwhile, we’ve just released a video for another track off “Now! That’s …”, the big instrumental “Desert Culture”. Never a single, but a live favourite, this tune was a good excuse to use the idea we’d always had of strapping a video camera to the front of a scooter and horsing it through Glasgow as fast as we could.
the 10th anniversary t-shirt “10 years of Bad. Scottish. Ska”
There are just too many Amphetameanies stories to tell, and I’m probably not the best to tell them, as Stan is infinitely better at making tales funny, while all the girls are great at remembering the details I’ve long forgotten.
However, we’ve played everything from huge posh festivals, to people’s living rooms; we’ve slept in nice hotels, we’ve slept in bare board squats; we’ve been pursued by groupies, we’ve been besieged by Nazis; we’ve played to huge crowds, we’ve played to barstaff and passers-by; and our travels have taken us from Shetland to Soho, Birmingham to Berlin. It’s been hilarious and I remember about a tenth of it.
Bands we’ve supported:
The Skatalites (lost count how many times)
Neville Staple (see above)
The Selecter
Bad Manners
Rancid
Jerry Dammers (well, he was DJing)
The Rezillos
The Exploited
Pama International
Franz Ferdinand
Joe Strummer
The Undertones
The Aggrolites
and many more I really don’t remember.
(of course, there is a major name missing from that list. A HUGE gap in our CV)
Plans:
There are 12 completely new songs written for album number three. As you’d expect if you know us at all, there are about half a dozen ska monsters in there, and a half a dozen other songs which defy easy description. But the feel is good… it sounds like us having fun, which was always the point.
We’ve started seriously rehearsing towards getting them all recorded sooner rather than later. Would be nice to have album three out a bit quicker than we managed album number two.
As for gigs, going to play as many as we can this year, to try out the new songs, raise a bit of cash and, of course, have an excuse for long drunken nights under plastic palm trees.
Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19
Taurus Apr 20 - May 20
Gemini May 21 - Jun 21
Cancer Jun 22 - Jul 22
Leo Jul 23 - Aug 22
Virgo Aug 23 - Sep 22
Libra Sep 23 - Oct 23
Scorpio Oct 24 - Nov 21
Sagittarius Nov 22 - Dec 21
Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19
Aquarius Jan 20 - Feb 18
Pisces Feb 19 - Mar 20
