Our new single, Love and Terror, is released today on digital download only.

You can buy it at the iTunes store and most other digital stores.

Peace out!

I was out for a drink with a few friends at a bar in town last night. I prefer meeting my friends during the week, when it’s quieter and easier to talk, as at the weekend most bars are often jammed-full with people celebrating a fleeting glimpse at freedom. Most of my friends are office workers, and don’t like drinking alcohol during the week when they have an early-start the following morning, so if I manage to convince any of them to come for a mid-week tipple then things seldom get too out of control. Getting out of control is one thing on tour, when you have a tour-manager babysitting you, keeping you on the straight-and-narrow and out of jail, but it’s another thing altogether back in Glasgow, where people just think you’re a cretin and tend to dish out their own vigilante justice.

We must have been in the bar for no more than an hour when one of my friends hollered to a suited fellow as he walked through the door. As it transpired, they knew each other from having worked together last year. The chap joined our table and the night continued as before, with talk of football, girls and swine-flu.

It wasn’t until the new chap grew curious about my friends’ references to what I’ve been doing with myself in recent years that the discussion grew teeth. In his best “girlfriend’s-dad” voice he asked me what I did for a living. I replied “I’m a musician” and a trip-wire seemed to twitch between his eyes. For someone so relatively young- I’d estimate that he’s only two or three years older than I am- he seemed hideously conservative. He asked me when I planned to get a proper job.

Though I am far from insecure about my place in the world, and could barely contain my laughter at this guy’s question, my friends sensed some kind of tension and quickly changed the subject to the matter of who should buy the next round. Billy Big-Statements beside me didn’t offer, so I made my way to the bar.

I returned three minutes later, with an impressive five pints grasped in my two hands, and could not resist the temptation to reignite the discussion with this interloper. Keeping my cool, I asked him casually what he did for a living. Only last year he was working with my friend- who would, by his own admission, do almost anything in exchange for twenty-eight thousand pounds salary- so I doubted very much if this new guy was now working on a cancer cure or flatulence-powered sports car. He responded by telling me that he works in a call-centre, selling insurance.

I am, as any of my friends will testify, an unrepentant menace. Had I been stone-cold sober then I would have allowed the moment to pass and let the conversation return to football... Instead, I told him that I thought any half-wit could take the low-road and scrounge a job like his, working as a cog in the rusting capitalist machine; suspended in a rotting yolk sac of unproductive boredom; just one oily-tentacle, feeding back to the foul and repugnant beast of Hades. If he knew anything about the classics then he’d have stopped me there. I probably went to too far when I told him that his whole life was pointless, because when that stinking beast loses the taste for the carrion he feeds it, the beast would simply lob-off that least essential of tentacles and move on to devouring more vital young men.

I’m not actually suggesting that hustler-songwriter-guitarists are critical for the future of the human-race, and I have nothing particularly against people who sell insurance or work in call-centres. What galled me about this fellow was his conceit; his sense that what he did with his life was somehow important, and certainly more important than what I do, simply because he wears a mid-priced suit to work. I may have met him at a poor time in his life- perhaps he’s recently lost his girlfriend to a guitarist!- and if I met him again we’d probably get along just dandy, but my point remains: we’re kidding ourselves if any of