Millie Week 56: Mon 30 Sept - Sat Oct 5 October

Remember Perhaps (Six Plastic Flasks), the bit of Gnomefumbler music that I posted last Saturday, the one with an extended Tupperware percussion break in the middle? It directly inspired the third strip this week.

I'm not making up the stylophone either. Of course, it has a long and noble history in pop music, being heard on David Bowie's Space Oddity and The Beatles' Continuing Ballad of Bungalow Bill to name but two. And Gnomefumbler used it to subvert the lumbering Heavy Metal riff of Bod and the Ice Pop and underline its ludicrousness.

Ironically, busking sites on the London Underground have since been commercialised - you have to be a professional busker nowadays, and have to play on a sponsored pitch. If you want to play the tube now, you need a manager!

Mobile

You don't see mobiles in art galleries any more. You see them in the SkyMall catalogue instead. They were a very 1950s form of art - the spindlier the better.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the wedding of Linda and I. Moo! Linda, I love you. Here's to many more years of mooing at one another.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Damien Hirst's famous pickled shark, a mixed media piece (tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 x 518 x 213cm according to the catalogue to the 'Sensation' show that it first appeared in).

The artwork is currently on its second shark, after the first one decayed and made the fluid it floated in go all cloudy. Despite being a remake it still sold for $8,000,000 in 2004.

The smell of technology

This is the first colouring job done on my new Mac. Thank goodness my graphics tablet still runs on it! I've been running an old Power PC iMac for the last eight years and I was starting to find I was no longer able to update my software or run anything over the web any more. GoComics had even started to refuse to upload my comics. So it was time to get a new iMac. I've suddenly leapt four systems and five versions of Photoshop.

The irony is I'm having to keep my old Mac going just as a scanning machine, as Canon can't be bothered to update the drivers for their scanners any more.

Can I say the new Photoshop interface is going to take a bit of getting used to - I can't put two cartoons next to one another and use the eye dropper tool to copy colours from one to the other - I now have to toggle between two tabs. It's like working in MS windows 20 years ago - I am not impressed.

It smells nice, though.

Millie week 55: Monday 23 - Saturday 28 1991

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was once involved in a school band. It was called Gnomefumbler. No-one can remember why it got that name - we think it was the result of an exercise in finding two incongruous words in a dictionary and sticking them together, though I did later find a character in a book of Round the Horne scripts called Ramsden Gnomefumbler, but this was probably coincidence.

The band played one disastrous gig at St Mark's Hall, Tunbridge Wells, but somehow managed to produce a string of albums on cassette and even sold a few through the fabled music magazine ZigZag.

Its origins were very much as you see here - a bunch of school kids with no real musical ability banding together in a bedroom with as many noise making items as they could find (not all of them musical instruments) and seeing what came out.

We produced several albums of chaotic improvised prog in the space of one year before splitting due to musical differences (one was moving on to proper noodly prog, one became half of a synthpop duo, one just sort of stopped, and I found that doing musical theatre meant I didn't have to pretend to play an instrument). The band reformed for three further cassette albums after we all left school, but they had proper songs and the musicians were a bit too proficient for my liking, so they're not really Gnomefumbler albums - more like albums by a band calling itself Gnomefumbler made by some people with the same names, but older.

I'll post some early tracks on here to give you a flavour of what DEF sound like, as soon as I work out how to digitise cassettes using my new Mac. All the old recording software I had doesn't work any more. Mutter mutter mutter.

DEF is an awful name for a band. It's a bad joke too. I think 'def', meaning 'definitive' or 'good', was in use on 'the streets' for about three minutes in 1983, and was about as hip as the Rock Steady Crew. The three letter acronym observation still holds, though - JLS being the latest example.

As for the last strip, I'd like to remind everyone that the Spice Girls didn't form until 1994, so I'm claiming this as comic prophesy.

UPDATE:

From Gnomefumbler's 1980 album 'Deckchair', here's Perhaps (Six Plastic Flasks).

The percussion you can hear is Tupperware. And the horn section is a length of aluminium tubing.
Guitars: Ian Tapp & Chris Tampsett. Percussion: Andrew Pilcher (assisted by Chris and Ian in the middle section) Monologue: Ian Tapp. Written: Tampsett/Tapp/Pilcher.

In contrast, from 1986's 'The Price of Fish', this is The Celery.

What a difference six years makes, eh? This is a riotous trawl through the musical fads of the time, listen carefully and you'll hear shades of The Smiths, Frankie goes to Hollywood and U2 in there.

Vocals: Andrew Pilcher, Guitar, Bass, Celery sample: Ian Tapp, Simmons Drums (how 80s can you get?): Austen LeGassic. Written: Pilcher/Tapp.

Kitsch

Yeah, but no, but yeah... Actually it's an incisive subversion of the Japanese Maneki Neko 'lucky cat' custom - would we accept it if it were real cats posed in shop doorways, forever forced to beckon customers over the threshold? Yeah. Right on.

Jocasta and Henry are typical metropolitan PIB's* down for the weekend in Hastings to look at the art and the poverty ("Gosh, it's terribly authentic here, isn't it, Jocasta?"). On the Jedward's opening night the town was full of art beings like these two, eating fish and chips out of newspapers and kidding themselves they were doing it ironically.

*Persons in black.

Parp!

The sculpture isn't actually based on anything - it's a sort of tromboney stainless steel thing of my own devising, possibly inspired by Anish Kapoor's Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park. (Sorry, Mr Kapoor, your stuff is normally excellent but this is a bit of a dud, I'm afraid. I can see what you meant but the execution of those smooth curves in straight structural steel sections just makes it look awkward.) Or maybe the fantasy organ on the cover of Pink Floyd's 'Relics' album.

Spark

No, it's not a lack of inspiration - it's a series. Jones is going through her 'identical pictures of cats' period, and each one is subtly different, tackling aspects of catdom that the lumpen proletariat just wouldn't be capable of understanding. Or something like that.

But its essentially a set-up strip for the next fortnight, spent at the gallery. Sorry, all those fans of Jones' beret, this is the last time you'll see it for a bit. But who knows, it may return...

Millie Week 54: Mon 16 Sept - Sat 21 Sept

First of all, hello. This is my first post with my new computer. I've been running the same iMac G4 since 2004, and while it's still going strong, it's going very very s l o w l y as well. Not only that, it's reached the point where I can't upgrade it any more, the CPU inside the computer is no longer supported. So it's time to make the change.

I'm still setting things up at the moment, but hope to have everything at the point where I can start posting new strips before the ones already up on the GoComics system run out. Now all my old apps have to be upgraded (thank you Adobe for your licencing system that allows you to install your aps at work and at home simultaneously). Now all I have to do is find some drivers for my scanner...

This continues the guitar storyline that started last week. I don't know how to play the guitar at all. I was once shown how to play two chords on a mandolin, but I don't know what they were.

Smith rampant, argent.

Smith is posed in the 'rampant' fashioned so loved by heraldic artists. Lions have a tendency to take up this position on shields, as do Kentish horses. However it's a really awkward pose to keep up.

The only animal I've ever seen which makes anything like this pose naturally in the wild is, of all things, the humble black-tailed prairie dog. It's a territorial display known as the jump-yip, and it's exactly what it sounds like. I've seen them in the Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock, Texas, and its fascinating to see one dog jump-yip and set off a chain reaction of other jump-yippers through the rest of the colony.

Twisted logic

I'm not sure this strip works, which is why I've moved it to midweek, rather than leave it exposed for an entire weekend on Friday. Either the logic is too twisted or not twisted enough, but I'm not sure which. Either that or I'm a bad judge of my own work - quite often I've found that what I consider to be sub-par strips are the ones that get the best reaction.

Jones' face goes all cubist in the last frame.

Coastal Currents, day one.

Coastal Currents launched this weekend. So far I've visited Laurence Poole and donated a few cars to his latest assemblage, which looks like it should be interesting. Baldly put, he's mounting a bunch of model cars onto a bit of board - arranged chromatically. Is this art? I'd say definitely, yes; it's the kind of thing I could put on a wall and stare at forever, considering the relationships between the models, the colours, the models themselves, etc etc. But then, I'm a middle aged man who collects model cars. His other assemblages involve pens and pencils, stamps and old vinyl records. I like them a lot. Take a look at them here.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, last night I visited the Stade Open space and watched the Karavan Ensemble combine 'promenade elements, dance, physical and visual theatre, interactivity and object animation in a site responsive context'. Or, to put it another way, they put a lampshade on their head and waved their arms around mysteriously. Then they hid behind a sheet and did some basic shadow puppetry (they waved their arms around in front of a torch) while someone else above the sheet, arranged so she appeared to be wearing it, waved her arms around as well (if you've seen Wicked, you've seen this done much better during 'Defying Gravity'). On my 'Emperor's got no clothes' scale, this performance scored a 'completely naked' rating. However, I award their publicity material the full five pseuds.

Millie Week 53, Mon 9 - Sat 14 Sept 1991

Handwriting analysts will have noticed that a last minute revision was made to the punchline in the first strip. The original one was 'He let me have the video free just for pure persistence'. As you can see it was changed to something which at the time seemed far more innocuous. Now we know a bit more about Mel, and how his slightly askew worldview colours his movies, we may have been better off sticking with the original.

The last two strips begin a new storyline, very much based on the band I was in when I was at school. I say 'band'. I say 'in'. Actually it was a collection of grammar school kids with more ideas than musical ability, and access to some high-end (for the day) recording equipment. The band was called 'Gnomefumbler'. This is all you need to know for now. The story continues next week...

Splodge

This is very much how I used to work before I discovered painting using Photoshop, which involves using much less clothes washing at the end of the day.

Pfouag!

From this I think we can deduce that Jones does not work in oils. I think she has more of a taste for poster paints. Especially the blue - that one tastes the best.

Coastal Currents

It's been a bit of an eventful month here are the Pilcher's. We got called over to the States where Linda's mum has been very ill. It's been a bit grim, but I won't concern you with the details - I'll just say that we wish Fumiko Robertson a quick and speedy recovery, and that we love her.

We're back now, and I'm a bit behind with my drawing, but I'm hoping I won't end up posting any strips late this month. I have three weeks in hand, so I'll be drawing like a madman this month to bring myself back to my usual month's worth ahead by the end of September.

We've got an new gallery in Hastings, The Jerwood Gallery, known to everyone in town as The Jedward. It opened this spring in a prominent position on the fishing beach, next to the net shops. It's an unpreposessing building, looking like a black-tiled public toilet from the outside, so low key that you almost feel it's apologising for being there. In fact there is a black tiled public toilet next door to it. If you get confused - the way to tell them apart is that the Jedward is the one with the windows.

Once you're inside though everything changes. It's bright and airy and the windows give you some beautifully framed views of the Old Town. The art inside the gallery is, to be frank, a bit of a mixed bunch. It's all modern and contemporary art, mainly 20th and 21st Century stuff. It all depends on what your tastes are I suppose - abstract expressionism doesn't impress me in the least, and canvases made up of formless splodges of paint are what take up most of the walls on the lower floor. Go upstairs and things improve immeasurably - this is where the Lowrys, the Stephen Spenders, the Walter Sickerts and the Augustus Johns are. Call me a Stuckist if you like, but I like my art to look like stuff.

This month is also when the Coastal Currents festival takes place in 1066 Country. It's essentially a three week period in which the local art community tries to outpseud one another. This year, amongst other artworks, we shall have a recreation of the US/Mexico border in a church hall, the end of the world in a town centre basement, an assemblage of model cars, a forest of bamboo and silk in a park by the seafront, and lots and lots of utterly pointless video masquerading as art. It's never less than interesting, and I wouldn't mind betting a lot of the least promising and most pretentious sounding art will actually turn out to be really worthwhile. Apart from the video art of course - by definition that's beneath contempt.

So this month you'll see the strip has a bit of an artistic bent, and will even include a visit to the gallery.

Jones' studio will not be part of the Coastal Currents Open Studio programme.

Millie Week 52 - Mon 2 - Sat 7 Sept 1991

We used to have a trivia machine in the Royal Oak pub, which was the favoured local of the youth drama group I was with in the 1980s. If we were skint we would invest 10p in it and could usually get enough money out of it to buy another round.

You never know who is reading these strips. A few days after the fourth strip was published the Daily Mirror forwarded me a hand written note. It simply said: "Actually, it was 1972" and was signed by a band member of Lieutenant Pigeon. As soon as I find it I'll scan it and put it in here. Suffice to say, it quite made my day.

The UK cinema and video (as it was then) ratings are as follows: U (suitable for everyone), PG (anyone can get in but parental discretion is advised), 12 (no-one under 12 allowed), 15 (no-one under 15 allowed) and 18 (no-one under 18 allowed). Of course, it is every teenagers duty to try to see anything that is considered outside their age range. At the time, the Daily Mirror had a listings supplement which would, supposedly as a service to concerned parents, detail all the naughty stuff that was available on new videos, providing teenagers with a detailed checklist of all the juiciest new releases.