I am abashed and ashamed. I am a charlatan of the lowest order! I abase myself before you! In the name of Jesus Gordon Christ I prostrate my very soul. I am guilty of the most frightful acts of horror, crimes so great that on hearing them you will doubtless claw your ears from your head so that you will hear no more. I have corrupted the very essence of myself; that I have done so for noble and just reasons is of weight in neither this world nor the next. I offer no excuse but merely ask that I might tell my story and that you in your mercy might see fit to forgive me, unworthy as I am.
Liam is not by conventional standards a bad bloke. This is to say that his soul is relatively pure despite his mind being tedious, his complexion verging on the leprous and his taste being artisan clad in the garb of the nouveau intellectuel.
He has that dull, hand-me-down, unconsidered morality that divides things so neatly into the right and the wrong. This division made him incapable of accepting that The People or The Rainforests or The Sixties could be prone to criticism. He dressed not for comfort or style but rather for communication and irony. His jacket was long, black, leather and somewhere between a tramp and an officer in the Gestapo. His jeans were bought for less than a tenner from a supermarket, his t-shirt was tie-dyed and I suspect bought from some kind of hippy trade fair. The ensemble was rounded off with a pair of sturdy hiking boots that were purple, unisex and more suited to the Alps than Oxfordshire. Whilst some charitably minded people may have described his fashion sense as “eclectic”, an honest observer would have had to have used the term “monstrous.” He justified his tastes by claiming that what you wore wasn’t a simple matter of protection from the elements but also an opportunity to make a statement and it was because of this that he was making an ironic gesture commenting upon the modern world’s obsession with how things looked. Of course it hadn’t occurred to him that it’s much better to look nice than ironic. His thought processes moved only monadic distances and as such the notion that it is just as foolish to dress ironically as it is to eat, fuck or shit ironically had never come to his attention.
His appearance alone made him worthy of crucifixion and yet in the hit parade of Liam's grating sins it only came in at number three. Directly above it was his tendency to come up with his own aphorisms. Not only did he think of them but he also wrote them down in a little note book and made little gleeful clicks and snorts which were desperate pleas for others to ask what he had just written. For your edification and amusement an example:
- Tut! Oh that’s good! Mmhmm, that’s good!
- What Liam? What is it that’s good?
- Oh, no, I can’t really say. It’s really clever but it does need the context.
- Tell me, Liam. I suspect it will irritate me but probably less so than this.
- OK, OK, well, it just occurred to me that absence makes the heart grow fonder but blow jobs really make it happy!
- And that’s why you interrupted me? In a more enlightened society your nut sack would be shaved with a cut throat razor and you’d be forced to bathe in vinegar.
We now must sadly and innevitably move on to the cardinal crime, the pinnacle of Liam's evil, the zenith of foulness that is his band. Going by the name "Oedipus Rocks" they had manged to exist for more than ten years in different incarnations, always with Liam as the chief creative force, always supposedly on the verge of making it big, always so dreadful that the sweetest angels would find tearing Liam's vocal chords out preferable to listening to him sing.
They were in the words of Liam "an agitational force in the name of apathy and rage compelled upwards by this dialectic...made by man but ordained by fate...able to retain charm, verve and superlative wit whilst also shocking the complacency out of this moribund scene."
In sound they mimicked the bouncier end of guitar pop whilst lyrically they did such wrongs that they should have been convicted of war crimes.
Just to underline the point:
"I've been dreaming of girls in bikinis,
who dance all night and bring me martinis,
but these pleasures are not for the new priests,
of the rejected, they are not for me!"