Come on Ova

We’re no strangers to a bit of hyperbole here at Mint Custard but when we called The Lovely Eggs’ Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It) – an effervescent 3 minute rush of Kenickie, Sultans of Ping, Jilted John and Half-Man Half Biscuit - as best single of 2011 back in January we might have left ourselves open to accusations of being a bit premature.

Instead, the Eggs (husband and wife Holly Ross and David Blackwell) have gone on to affirm their place in our hearts with their second album Cob Dominos. Packed with more musical left-turns than you’d think possible in 37 minutes, it’s full of homespun wisdom, heartbreaking tales of unrequited love, cider, sausage rolls, crap jobs, first class swearing and the loveliest anthem to paranoia that will ever be written. It also contains recent single, Fuck It which might be just about the best answer for anyone trying to make sense of the madness that has been 2011 so far.

Keen to find out more about the band who give us a washing line smile, we had a chat with Holly earlier this week. Here’s what she had to say…

Hi Holly - thanks for joining us for a chat. Can we get you some tea and biscuits, or pop and cake? Cheese and Strongbow. All day, every day.

Congratulations on Cob Dominos – it’s one of our favourite albums of 2011. What’s the reaction been like so far? Thanks. The record seems to have gone down quite well we think. People have swallowed it whole. We've not got many copies left so we're re-releasing it on beautiful 12” vinyl. Oh yes we are. They will be limited edition and all hand numbered. Each one will come with a special certificate of authenticness and a letter from us. It's gonna be special. They will be available from September. People can get them direct from us but we've not worked that part out yet.

Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It) is a bit special. Did some of the expressions in the lyrics [sausage roll thumbs, dog dirt eyes, car boot bones] come from people you know or are they all made up? Most of them are made up. But some are real or at least an elaboration on something real that was said. We suppose it's inspired by some of the stuff you hear everyday in Lancaster. We've got some cob expressions up here you know.

There’s that word again. Round our way a cob is a bread roll. What does cob mean in Lancaster and what - if anything - are cob dominos? Cob means funny or weird. A cob domino is someone who's a bit odd you would say. My mum calls us it all the time. She says we're a couple of cob dominos which is where the name came from.

Print an Imprint and Books, Ting! remind me of those bits in The Office where they show how boring 9-5 work can be by filming the photocopier sorting paper. Have you had terrible jobs over the years? Well David was a printer before he started working at Lancaster Musicians' Co-op so that's what that's all about. I've done loads of jobs. I've worked in a newsagent, at a meat shop (grim), at a chocolate shop, I’ve worked as a care assistant in a nursing home, as a tour guide at Lancaster Castle, as a bar maid, I worked as a local journalist, a writer for a travel company in Paris, a TV researcher and then a documentary producer/director and then in a book shop. The shittest one was the meat shop. I am a vegetarian. I thought I could handle it. I couldn't.

Watermelons features a backing army of kazoos to lovely effect. Did you have a room full of people all playing at the same time? No, just me and David. I think that was done before the digital kazoo was invented. David made it up from a kazoo and a pound shop microphone. It’s patent pending. He likes to call it the electric kazoo, but I prefer to call it the digital. Electricity is more than 100 years old. Nobody is phased by electricity any more. They take it for granted. In fact I think electricity has always been there. It comes from the sky I believe.

You’re both sporting magnificent fringes on the artwork for Cob Dominos. How do you feel about fringing on other things – jackets, boots, settees etc? There's nothing wrong with a nice bit of fringing on a settee or, say, a cushion. I don't think we have anything else fringed though. No, not like that...

The incomparable John Shuttleworth is your co-star in the video for Don’t Look At Me. Was that exciting or had your paths already crossed previously? We had met before when he performed in Lancaster. We both love Mike Leigh's Play for Today Nuts in May and just hit it off. He is a very nice man who likes eating sausage rolls. Was it exciting? Yes it was.

Watching Mr Shuttleworth’s original alter-ego Jilted John the other day it struck me that - besides great fringes - there were some musical similarities between you. Who else influences you? There are lots of things that influence us, writers and poets and relations and stuff that happens to you outside yer house. I suppose what a lot of the bands we like have in common is they don't give a shit and are just doing what they want. For us it is bands like The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Huggy Bear, Nirvana, Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers, Jad Fair, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. They were all doing something different, making their own sound, which is I suppose what we are inspired by. We like to plough our own furrow. There are no rules in our band.

You released your last single on a bank holiday with the following message on Twitter: New single Fuck It comes out tomorrow. You can’t buy it cos all the shops are closed. You won’t hear it cos it can’t be played on the radio. You’re not in this for the money are you? No.

Is there any chance of seeing the Lovely Eggs in Australia at some point? We would love to. We just don't know any promoters over there yet. That would be amazing if we could pull that one off.

Do you have fans that bring you gifts or make you things? We've got some lovely fans who send us stuff. We've had two fountain pens through the post. We also had some sort of whale sponge and someone sent us a poem. We often get drawings. I always write back to everyone. I think that letters are just the best. Emails should be clunked out. If you want to write to us our address is The Lovely Eggs, c/o Lancaster Musicians' Co-op, Lancaster, Lancashire, England, UK, LA1 1XD

Mexico Can’t Make You Smile continues the Twin Peaks references from your Haunt Me Out EP. What chewing gum would you like to come back into style and did you get to Washington State (where Twin Peaks was filmed) on your American tour? Yes we did. We went to visit North Bend and visited all the locations. We had a very surreal and slightly frightening experience at the motel used in the film Fire Walk With Me. We’ll tell you about it if we ever see you. We are slightly obsessed by Twin Peaks. We better stop talking about it now. Chewing gum…? PK.

We got to go this year and did something similar. The Double R Diner is still there and they do some very lovely eggs themselves, as well as a top cherry pie. Good place to do a gig? Don't even tempt us

For more Lovely Eggs visit their MySpace page myspace.com/thelovelyeggs or follow Holly and David on Twitter via @TheLovelyEggs. That said, when was the last time you wrote someone a nice letter…?

The Lovely Eggs, Oeuf Course

Folks, its been too long. Time to set feeling sorry for myself and my broken arm aside and start 2011 proper. And what better way to start than with a song. Not mine, obviously. I'm a talentless tone deaf lump. Thankfully the Lovely Eggs are none of those things and to prove it they have released the best song of 2011. Already.

It is called Don't Look at Me I don't Like It and it is flipping ace. If you don't believe me (and frankly why would you?) have a listen at their MySpace page. Better still why not watch the equally wondrous video, which features both old lady knickers and living legend John Shuttleworth.




My thanks to Mr Flange - a long time friend of Mint Custard - for introducing me to my new favourite band. They have cheered me immensely during my temporary incapacity and as you can see they even prompted me into some one handed typing. My love only grew when i learned they have also recorded a Twin Peaks tribute EP. One song features the rather brilliant couplet Leland Palmer's invited me for tea, but then I see a denim jacket lying on his settee... which is as close to genius as you need from a husband-wife combo with marvelous haircuts. The Lovely Eggs. Lovely.

Don't Look at Me I Don't Like It is on sale on 31 January, and will be followed by the album Cob Dominos on 14 February. Check out the Lovely Eggs MySpace page for more details. Or don't and live a less sparkly life.

On Top of Old Smokie

As some of you will know the final episodes of the epic TV show Lost are being broadcast around the world as we speak, building up to the big season finale at the end of May. For some the end will be a chance to finally find out some answers, many years after the tropical polar bears, smoke monsters and general strangeness led them to turn off their TV sets in frustration. For others the finale will mark the end of six seasons of intense speculation, water cooler hypothesising, stoned pondering, hours of dedicated online forums and terabytes worth of internet content trying to puzzle out what-the-huh-and-why?

My own journey has been relatively brief but no less intense. Just over a year ago Mrs Custard bought the first season of Lost on DVD. We had resisted so long primarily because every clip I ever saw of Lost seemed to feature a new was of showing an aeroplane crash and anyone who has ever seen me fly will tell you I just don’t need that kind of thing in my head. Having ploughed ahead and already made her way to Season 3 it was Mrs Custard who persuaded me to stick with the adventures of Oceanic Flight 815 by reassuring me that despite the mid-flight carnage ‘it’s a bit like Twin Peaks.’

In the beginning: the Island runway and terminal facilities need a bit of work

So, anyway, here I am - fully up to date on events from the previous five seasons just in time for the grand denouement. And because I’m up to date, another part of the Lost universe has finally opened up to me; the internet. After years of skilfully avoiding any and all conversations, articles, reviews, interviews or debates about Lost that might spoil the show, now my appetite for all such things is bigger than Hurley’s for Mr Cluck’s chicken. Straight after every episode I’m online to find out about clues I’ve missed, the latest theories on what Locke / Flocke / Man-in-Black / Esau / the Smoke Monster is up to and just what Desmond means in all of this, brother.

Dissecting David Lynch aside (and we all need help with that) I must admit that up til now I’ve never truly embraced my own internerd. I read the odd article on what-might-have-beens with Star Wars (I’m still sad that Lynch turned down the director job on Return of the Jedi) and enjoyed discussions around Life on Mars but as a rule I’ve stayed away from online obsessives. This is partly because I haven’t seen any of the shows that people trade blows over, but mostly because – as I now know from Lost – some people posting have an unpleasantly disproportionate view on their place in all of this.

One would imagine visiting a site populated by fans of something you like would be an affirming experience. Interesting then that so many of them (and there are lots) should be chock full of anger and resentment, mostly directed towards the people who created the show they like. I don’t know what the past five years have been like but the weekly comments on forums such as the Washington Post’s Lost Central or the Guardian’s Lost in Lost following each show are often so far beyond critical that they become personal (look at any of the comments below this interview with main writers Carlton Cuse and David Lindelof, including accusations of being ‘arrogant pricks’. Nice.)

The Season 3 cast including a much missed Mr Eko

As Season 6 has edged closer to its conclusion one of the key accusations that people keep levelling at Cuse and Lindelof (‘LindCuse’ or ‘Darlton’ depending on which nerd site you prefer) is that they don’t know what’s going on. Impatient to get to the end and frustrated by a perceived lack of answers, there is insistence that the writers are making it up as they go along. Despite reassurances for the past six years that there has is an overarching story and a point to everything that happens on the show, people - fans apparently – are desperate to prove them wrong. They do this by picking out every inconsistency, flaw or continuity error they can (aided and abetted by Lost uber-site Lostpedia) and posting them online with a big “ha! You suck, you losers!”

Now before I’m accused of blindly towing the official line, I do kind of understand how people feel here. I too had my Tim-from-Spaced moment with the crushing disappointment of the Phantom Menace. I know what it’s like to invest in something emotionally for many years and then see it pooed on from a great height by a stranger with a beard. Yet the crucial difference is I’ve seen the Star Wars prequels. All of them. To the end. At this point nobody but the writers know what’s going to happen in Lost – the very people who keep reassuring us that everything will be fine.

'And in the end...' : the owls are not what they seem

So hey, given that you’ve enjoyed over 100 hours worth of Lost over six years (I hope you have, or more fool you for keeping on watching) why not trust them in them for a few more hours and just see what happens? Hypothesise, speculate, have hope, get excited – it’s part of what makes Lost so appealing - but don’t slag off a show you supposedly love because this week they happened to confound your expectations of what should happen. It’s not your show, no matter how long you’ve been watching it. And remember this - unlike 99% of television programs Lost still hasn’t jumped its shark, sold out or let down characters we’ve grown to love. As John Locke and Jack Sheppard discovered there’s every reason to have faith that everything will work out right.

Feeling Peaky

I hate it when I start writing something for this site and then read an article in a newspaper somewhere about the same thing. Bloody paid journalists… haven’t they, um, got something better to do? Still when it concerns Twin Peaks I’m happy to read anything and if you would too then feel free to have a read of this article in the Guardian today including interviews with some of the principal actors.

For those who don’t care about such things you might not have realised that its twenty years this month since Laura Palmer – high school beauty queen and secret drug-sniffing skank – was found dead, wrapped in plastic, her lips a beautiful Avatar-blue. Riding into town to her posthumous rescue was FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (‘Diane, I'm holding in my hands a small box of chocolate bunnies’) and television was never quite the same again.

Twin Peaks was mismanaged and axed after just two seasons but it left an indelible mark on me and television programming in general. Northern Exposure, the X-Files, Carnivale, Life on Mars, Deadwood, Lost (especially Lost) and any program that assumed a modicum of intelligence from its audience all flowed in Peaks’ slipstream. It also set the standard for the now common practice of internet fandom with conventions, fanzines and theory discussion all taking place in a pre-world wide web universe. Even now there are some excellent websites covering just about every aspect of Twin Peaks (the most comprehensive being Glastonberry Grove which is well worth a few hours of your internet time).

As a (slightly obsessive) fan it’s always nice to hear the actors’ perspectives on the show but what all devoted Peakies want to know about is will there ever be any more? (Spoiler alert) The television series ended with a Bob-possessed Dale Cooper banging his bleeding forehead against a broken bathroom mirror in his hotel room; evil seemingly triumphant over good with the real Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge. Hopes that this might be resolved by the 1992 feature film Fire Walk With Me were not to be, the film receiving a critical mauling from those desperate for answers.

All nostalgists hang for more of their favourite shows, bands and movies but Twin Peaks has a curious get-in card that it can play anytime between now and 2015. The one shard of hope that all is not over in lies in something said in the third episode, during Cooper’s infamous dream sequence (you know the one: red curtained room, black and white floor, dancing dwarf talking backwards?) In the scene a greying and prosthetically aged Cooper sits in an armchair whilst someone who appears to be Laura says to him “I’ll see you in 25 years…meanwhile..”

The implication is that our beloved Special Agent will remain trapped in the Black Lodge for a quarter of a century, at which point something will happen. The mythology around the Lodge implies that time has no meaning in there and I’m not delusional enough to believe that Mark Frost and David Lynch intended to pick up where they left off 25 years on, but it’s still an exciting and quite plausible loophole to kick things off again.

In reality a number of the key players have passed away since 1992, including Bob, Major Garland and (one of my personal favourites) Senor Droolcup, the aged waiter who is never far from the ring-stealing Giant (I know this sounds mad if you’ve never seen Twin Peaks). Still there are enough of the main cast still around, and with Frost and Lynch at the helm, some new characters and a whole lot of well-thought out retro-fitting I reckon there could be a huge hit waiting to happen for a brave network. With Lost winding up and Flash Forward stalling on its heels there will be plenty of room for a bit of intelligent clue-dropping on our screens. Over to you Mr Lynch… time to save television all over again.