BEEP! Message received 1.02am: ‘‘The fix is at 125th avenue, on the corner at midnight, tomorrow. You ghost The Rube and you’re snuffed, you hear me? Love VV.’’ BEEP!

Down in the basement – Prick my brain...

I went alley skulking with The Kills. I got an invite, you see… They tapped my phone; they’ve been twiddling my wires, fixing the signal. They’re two shrouded assassins, skeletal white fingers, plucking through fibrotics in the dark. Obsessively. Dangerously. Nothing but a spirit-soaked, fag scorched copy of ‘Horses’ for companionship, fuelling their shadow-porn fixations, crackling through a brittle, smoking antique four-track player. Pushers from across the street wonder briefly why the light in that room is on all night...

Conscious Psychosis – It’s more than the sounds...

I took up this invitation; some husky, breathy voice over my sub-conscious answer phone, some cryptic, encoded message that struck me clear and perplexed me all at once. The girl sounded starving, Greenwich-boheme desperate: ‘I’m not trying to wake you up...’ It troubled me, she came prickling, detached, and beyond the reality I was walking. Hissing... hackles flaring back at any offer of help or consolation, she was spitting like a rock n’ roll wildcat. It kept coming at me in my sleep, incongruously clear, cruel and ill, and at odds with the murky lo-fi noises in the background. She didn't need help, not my help.

Shadows Stir – These kids don’t eat properly...

Out into the sooty Parisian night we flew... They intrigued me for too long to just sit staring at my feet, pondering over the mystery of what could be. Two cloaked, needle-thin figures led me off into their Maupin-infatuated, Lou Reed haunt of uneasy, snap-tight sexual come-ons, groin-pulsating Zeppelin fuck-me-riffs and disaffected, late-night voices. They revealed to me, in compulsive fashion, what they get up to every night... with a pair of burnt-out Telecasters and a prodding, thumping drum-machine that, for all the world, could've had a consciousness. I was scared to dance. I longed to dance; that droning ‘Mary Chain grind stimulated all the right areas for a kind of lousy, low hung sex waltz... but fuck me... I was afraid that what I was dancing to, was kinda sick... or wrong, or something... I liked it that way though.

If you listen to music purely for the peripheral pleasures of ‘song’, ‘melody’ or ‘instrument’, then you'd be wise to leave The Kills well alone. If, like me, you crave for characters, oddities, antagonism, mystery and journeys into the dark abyss of junkies and poets, then enter their world. Entirely at your own risk.

They told me to forget everything I’d seen, come dawn…