Simon Morris / Ceramic Hobs

Ceramic Hobs - Use Your Illusion III
Independent Woman Records. CD 010. CD + Booklet.
100 copies.


Simon Morris - Sea of Love
Amphetamine Sulphate


I’m thinking Simon Morris statue on Blackpool Prom. I’m thinking statue draped with used condoms, crushed and empty packets of Embassy Regal bottom half of cellophane still attached, low birthweight warnings, Ceramic Hobs song titles graffitied on to bare chest, pages torn from the works of Kathy Acker and biros with chewed ends left at the base Jim Morrison stylee, fans from around the globe arriving on the Fylde Coast in all weathers [but mainly rain] to pay their respects and have a pint in the Spoons across the road that might one day carry his name. The Simon Morris serving [eventually] bored drunks glasses of Australian brandy and non european lagers. Later a yearly festival of Hobs inspired music where singer-songwriters extrapolate Cupcakes in shutdown shop doorways while ropey bands on drugs and Lidl alcohol try to make sense of 33 Trapped Chilean Miners all this as people recite passages from Morris’s books in a mock Lancashire drawl.

Recorded at last years Tusk Festival in Gateshead Use Your Illusion III is the best live Hobs release to pass through these hands. I was there. A band that everybody was more than ready for after a day and a half of chin rubbing and musing. Morris stamped around the stage bare chested, displaying a gut of some considerable size [‘all paid for’ you used to hear down the pub while the owner of said gut stuck it out even further and patted it proudly like a man would a prize marrow].  When not sticking his gut out Morris planted one foot hard in front of the other and made as if for one killer head-butt thus helping expel his words at hurricane force. His voice is remarkable, a gnarly growly shout, his face a twisty tormented thing, his gut sticks over his black jeans like a mutant pregnancy. Rock ‘n’ Roll mate. After warbling the opening bars of a Star is Born and covering what they say is Alice Copper’s first single from 1966 [‘No Price Tag’] they fly into Shaolin Master which is still the best song about coach-potato machismo ever written [I’ll kick yer arse mate - I’m the last of the invisible white ninjas]. There’s a couple of new tracks one of which they finish with [Dog One] which is encouraging and all the hits from the ’80’s, 90’s and 2000’s’ as Morris laconically informs us. There was a new band member too, a female one playing a keyboard. The guitarist played dead when everybody else had left the stage. The rest of the band look at him as if he was daft. He probably is. When we get to ‘This Sore and Broken Blackpool Legacy’ the mood darkens and along with it a much slowed down pace. Its their longest track of the set and maybe the nearest the Hobs will get to a ‘Freebird’ or a ‘Hurricane’ except its probably about deceased band members and the putrid pull of Britain’s sleaziest seaside resort. Not that there’s ever going to be any guitar noodling here just Morris growling a moribund ‘endless’ as the funereal march makes its way down the promenade. Thirteen tracks including a killer thirty seconds worth of White Noise. Overdubbed intro includes Cheap Trick playing Dream Police [paranoia?] and an outro of what sounds like the kind of record football clubs used to make when they got to the FA Cup Final. A booklet of lyrics makes for interesting reading.

The sleeve and title are nods to Guns N’ Roses of course, a Morris obsession that  provided the framework for his previous book ‘Civil War’. It being a critique of every GNR album and album track with throwaway sex and violence accompanying each review. ‘Sea of Love’ is divided in to chapters that cover the first eight James Herbert novels, except Morris has done away almost entirely with any notion that these chapters will be about James Herbert’s first eight novels, each novel being dismissed in a sentence or two before embarking on the matter of Morris’s many sexual relationships. All of who remain nameless and most of whom appear to be married except for the cute singer in the boy band who drunkenly asks him ‘are you going to fuck my face then?’ Which came as a bit of a shock as I never knew Morris was bisexual. Or is he? Are we in fact or fiction land? Does it matter? The opening tract [pre Herbert] is a very thinly veiled attack on a well known Irish experimental film maker that is very much not fictional. I can only assume that this is Morris being antagonistic, maybe even spiteful. An interlude checking the first eight Stephen King novels describes a visit to a prostitute who specializes in domination amongst other meetings of mind and flesh. Fun, fun, fun it isn’t.

As we pass through each relationship and the drink and the drugs and the endless cigarettes and the crap pubs and the very good Spanish cafes that go with them its Morris’s mind that we get to know more than anything else. On the final page he says goodbye to his Spanish girl at the airport:

‘she holds me tight and sings Sea Of Love in my ear one last
time and she likes seeing me cry but it’s so deep it’s hurting and I look
into her kind eyes and feel the softness of her breasts and her scent
against me one last time before I go through and do the shoe and bag
scan thing, and she is stood there and we can see each other and I just
stand there for a long time and so does she, staring at each other
across the distance and sometimes waving and the tears are still
falling and she says she loved it that I was just stood there like a creep
staring and eventually I have to go and find my gate in this huge
place and we made plans for another visit each way but she knew I
would find someone else and I knew she would never leave that man …'
In and amongst all that casual sex and alcohol is Morris trying to make sense of the death of one time Hobs member Calum Terras. Its a short passage but its central to the book. All that sex and alcohol is just stuff that happens. This books central theme feels as if its more concerned with death than sex and booze. That he can write with such tenderness in and amongst all this nihilism makes the book even more depressing. Like Morris’s previous Amphetamine Sulphate publications Civil War and Creepshots [apparently an ongoing Arthouse sequence], Sea of Love is a slim tome but one that carries much weight.





Amphetamine Sulphate




Independent Woman Records