I think the only thing I wanted more than being a singer – much more, actually – was to recover from the violence of the circumstances of my childhood, and to be a voice for others who had gone through, or were going through, the same thing. So there were a few tiers to the entire ripping up a picture of the Pope on live television thing, from 1992. One of them was, I wanted to rip up my own image as a “pop star”, which is not what I wanted to be perceived as, and which is not what I was, or am. But the other thing, obviously, was very directly linked into all this invisible child abuse, that was tacitly condoned by the Catholic Church. And it was linked to this idea that someone should be a kind of a whistle-blower, for want of a better fucking word.

Sadly, American people are only discovering this history of abuse and violence within the Church very lately. So in that context I can understand why people were so outraged by the whole thing at the time, because they knew absolutely nothing about it. But we in Ireland at that time, did know. And that’s why I did what I did on SNL – I wanted to draw attention to that fact, and to announce, in a way, a sort of war.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m so fucking proud of it. I’m almost as proud of it as I am of either of my children, to be honest.

And, speaking of infestations, the Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious continues to buzz closer to the top, moving up to Number Sixty-three with sales of 20,000. With The Eminem Show, the charts have a strong leader, but the album seems to be leading only itself. The door is wide open for a Nevermind-type bellwether, and the brash Hives are delightfully free of the indie purism that can deep-six a promising path to the mainstream.

• "Pounding." Sounded grand.
• "There Goes The Fear." Couldn't quite live up to the jaw-droppingly complicated album version but was still far beyond excellent, especially when Jimi Goodwin ditched his bass in favor of bongos for the finale.
• "Sea Song." Rapturous audience reception. A lot heavier than the album version. Sounded great.
• "Words." Loses a little something without the lead-in of "Intro," but I loved the traded-off/shared vocal attack.
• "Rise." See "Sea Song."
• "Friday's Dust." My least favorite track on The Last Broadcast and it didn't do too much more for me here.
• "New York." As can be expected.
• "Satellites." My second-least favorite track on The Last Broadcast. (Heh.) Was still quite enjoyable, though.
• "Catch The Sun." Wasn't crazy about the extended intro -- I *love* the starts-from-nowhere leap of the original -- and Jimi sadly neglected to include a lot of the impassioned howls in the middle eight, but still, nothing can touch this song in full flight.
• "Caught By The River." Again, rockier than the album version, and less magisterially spacey, but sounded equally great in this form.
• "The Cedar Room." The lead-in to this was spine-tinglingly great, but it seemed to catch them off-guard -- I think they weren't expecting it to start so soon, or needed new instruments, or something; once they began it, the guitar seemed to be out of tune for much of the chorus. The song ended up sounding entirely different, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't slightly disappointing; however, it's pretty fucking hard to kill this song and they attacked it with remarkable vigor. Still ended up being transcendent.

• "Here It Comes." The drummer (I forget which Williams twin he is, but he's a *fantastic* drummer) traded places with Jimi for the vocals on this one, dedicating it to The Strokes who were apparently in the audience (heh).
• I don't actually know what the last song was -- it wasn't a Doves song; it was a keyboard-loop-driven club single that may've been an old Sub Sub song; unfortunately I'm woefully un-versed in that material. In any event it sounded fucking fantastic (the bass was so heavy it shook my vocal cords) and was played with video accompaniment by a montage of clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey. So huzzah.

• They seemed kind of surprised and humbled to be playing such a crowd that had shown up just for them -- Hammerstein Ballroom holds about 3,000 people and it was pretty much full. They kept having the light techs put the spots on us so they could see us and grin madly between songs...
• Elbow's visual director was better than theirs -- the video accompaniment for Elbow's stuff was surprising and intriguing; for the first two songs of Doves' set, they just had the videos for the songs playing behind them (mind you, "There Goes The Fear" is a great video). Things got a little varied later, but music-video clips turned up in "Catch The Sun," too, and for "Caught By The River" they showed one long shot of -- you guessed it -- a river. Ahem.
• The pre-show music between Elbow and Doves' set was superbly mixed, including Joy Division's "These Days" and New Order's "Ceremony." Mmmm. But between The Rapture and Elbow they just played the Vanessa Carlton album. Ewww.
• The shirt I bought is neat, but probably too big for me. Grrr.

• "45"
• "Waiting For The End Of The World"
• "Watching The Detectives"
• "Spooky Girlfriend"
• "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea"
• "Clown Strike"
• "Daddy Can I Turn This?"
• "When I Was Cruel No. 2"
• "I Hope You're Happy Now"
• "Clowntime Is Over"
• "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution)"
• "Tart"
• "Brilliant Mistake"
• "All The Rage"
• "Beyond Belief"
• "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding?"
• "Radio Radio"

• "Dust 2..."
• "15 Petals"

• "Alibi"
• "You Belong To Me"
• "Pump It Up"

• "Episode Of Blonde"
• "Lipstick Vogue"
• "I Want You"

• Just to see the clerk's reaction.
• To break a large bill.
• Because I wanted to watch a movie, but I didn't have three hours tonight, nor did I have the intellectual stamina for The Godfather. However I have tomorrow afternoon free.

Holding on for dear life at the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday night, watching what must surely be the most electrifying band in the world right now blowing a packed-out house of instant believers back on their quivering haunches, I kept wondering: Is there any other group -- anywhere -- that the Hives couldn't totally incinerate with the merest flick of their guitar picks?

The answer -- trust me on this -- is no. (...)

For years -- at least since the end of Nirvana -- discerning music lovers have longed for some great Savior Band to bust through and blow away all the gooey boy groups, tiresome teen divas, witless rap-metal oafs, you know the litany. The Hives, I'm willing to bet, are that band.

1. I had to wake up at 7:30 to call in to work and see if they wanted me to come in for nine. fucking. hours. And they did not. I promptly yelped my glee (quietly, so as not to awaken my parents) and rolled over and slept until noon.
2. I left the house and accomplished all of my errands (including finally, finally sending out my Discs Of Fury) in record, efficient time.
3. I got my paycheck and it was eyebrow-raisingly higher than anticipated. I am going to rock New York City (and my credit-card debt) so hard next week...
4. I bought the new David Bowie album, Heathen (the limited edition, natch). It's spectacular. His cover of The Pixies' "Cactus" is a thing of astonishing excellence. And the rest of the album is brimming with subtle and not-so-subtle charms... mmm.
5. I went to a new comic book store. Sarasota hasn't had a good comic book store since, well, ever. My friend Tina and I were so desperate to have one that we started drawing up our own fan-fictional store. I am happy to say that two months ago, we were beaten to it. I left there with the two latest issues of New X-Men and Strangehaven (a small-town store had Strangehaven in stock! That RULES!), the new Hopeless Savages, and the first issue of The Filth. This store was remarkable in every way... more after another visit.
6. We're going out for an early Father's Day dinner tonight (parents running off to NYC for the weekend to see the US Open) at a deeeelectable restaurant.

Welcome to crackcomicks.com where the heartbreaking wet dreams of disabled youngsters and the mentally-thwarted can sometimes come true but rarely do!

crack!comics - the home of all-new and original comick book stories built from scratch and designed to come off on your hands and all over your mind like a bad memory. Launching in Summer 2002 with the filth, Grant Morrison's crack!comics aims to bring weird fun in surreal picture form to the bored, the clever and, above all, the beautiful.

crack!comics is a division of gmWORD, purveyors of memetically-engineered ‘Frankenconcepts’ since 2002.