Bongo, Mugs and Scissors

Legal advice. If you ever need it, ask a clown. That’s probably the best bit of advice my Dad ever gave me. Ask a clown. And so, when Balustrade got into a spot of legal bother this week, they turned to former Moscow State Circus clowns Bongo, Mugs and Scissors. It all started last Thursday when Lex, high on the joys of summer of other things, came up with an idea for a new middle8 for The Harvest Song. Unfortunately, ElCartino had already written an identical middle8 for a different song. So he sued Lex in a thinly-veiled attempt to get his increasingly greasy mits on Lex’s enviable collection of imported Region 1 DVDs and photographs of monkeys and lemurs doing hilarious/unspeakable things with boomerangs and air pumps. Luckily, Messers Bongo (representing Lex) and Mugs (Representing ElCartino) managed to force an out of court settlement, with both parties paying the other’s lawyer £15. Mister Scissors, meanwhile, didn’t have a lot to say as he can’t speak. He’s a pair of scissors, and his legal qualifications look like they’ve been photocopied.

However, he did come in useful as an instrument of percussion/torture juts this very evening when he was called to add his dulcet tones to the now almost-complete Harvest Song. Listen out for his old friends Bongo and Mugs, too, as well as Tam Bourine, a frightening cliché of an eighteenth-century Irish navy busy digging the Kennet and Avon canal… erm. Yeah.

Anyway, we’re both dead chuffed with the progress that we’ve made on The Harvest Song this evening. Listening back to the demos we made a few months ago, what one a steaming pile of fresh cow manure is now something so pure, glistening and fruity that you could slap it in a bikini and sell the photos to Nuts. If you really wanted.

Anyway, the plan is for us to re-do Winter Nights next week, so I’ve got to strengthen my jaw for all those ten-minute harmonica solos and I come over all Bob Dylan / Badly Drawn Boy. I can’t wait… can you?