“It was madness and sadness and drinking and dope and tears and anger and harsh plaster smiles…many people were rip-smashed and optimistic, but some knew better…”—Steve Levine
We are living through strange days, passengers on a badly engineered, shoddily constructed suicidal roller coaster with no finite end, zipping hell bent for leather into a fiery sunset without so much as a complimentary nitrous oxide mask to ease the increasing discomfort of the journey. Perhaps the least honorable way to spill your blood in public (and on the internet) is by complaining, and let this not be viewed as a complaint or a critique of a demented situation, but as a careful documentation of it. We are off into the unknown, heading straight into the inner reaches of outer space without any sound knowledge of the territory or its laws.
Music, as always, is a chief source of solace, a refuge and an escape, and this month we are afforded a bit more of it in the form of the Children of the Pope’s most recent single release: “Thalidomide Boy,” debuted on October 14th, on Isolar Records.
It’s a song that follows in the vein of the group’s beloved psych rock– dreamlike, but with a twist of hard-nosed guitar riffs and a storyline to break your heart. The vocals carry an eerie, ethereal echo, as if resounding up from some cold cavernous depth. It’s not a comforting song, not a song to kick back on the loveseat and sip a glass of wine to. But you have Sinatra for that. The Children of the Pope are here to serve a different purpose entirely. They have proved their prescience once again with a track that explores the age-old way we find succor (“he brings the laudanum/clasps his hands around the cross”) without ultimately being able to drive away despair (“and he shouts/ and he screams/for everyone to see/ he’s the kind of guy who ends up walking in the middle of the street.”) It’s a relatable, empathetic depiction of a pattern that cuts through all our lives, albeit in different ways and forms.
Juno Valentine, the group’s front man and chief lyricist, spoke about the song’s meaning in-detail: “The song is a short story I created about a juvenile opiate dealer who suffers from a sleep walking disorder and ends up in 24-hour peep shows and blue movie cinemas and makes that his home for a good part of the week. He’s a devout Christian, but still appreciates the smells and atmosphere of the cinema screen. I think the whole story originated from feeling like an outcast growing up… a surrealist exaggeration of my time as a teenager.”
You can catch the Children of the Pope live at the Windmill Brixton on October 29th. Tickets are on sale on the venue website, linked below.
https://www.windmillbrixton.co.uk/events/2022-10-29-halloween-hellhole-all-dayer-the-windmill
