ANYWAY, enough with the festive talk. We were in Wolf studios at the weekend again, I Love You at 200'000 ft, is now finished and sounding supercool, and we started working on First Out, which doesn’t sound so cool at the moment, but will get there, with a little bit of working and LOVE.

On Saturday we start rehearsals for our live shows in the New Year, who can wait for that? It will be really nice for us to rehearse as a band in a PROPER studio and not have to get shouted at to "turn it down!" by Jeremy’s neighbours all the time!!! It was really brilliant on Wednesday, because me and Jeremy went round Chelsea Kelsey’s and watched "I Dont Want To Be Born" on DVD. If you have never seen it I would really recommend you watch it, its all about Joan Collins having a baby that gets possessed by the devil after an unkind midget dancer puts a curse on her because she wont shag him, we had mince pies and red wine as well, to stop us from getting too scared!! It was brilliant.

Hope you all have a happy time over Christmas time,

LOVE
Kim Phaggs x

Saturday saw us back in Wolf Studios again working with the genius that is Dominic Brethes. As Scumpop is finished we decided a definite change was needed, so we tackled “I Love You At 200,000 Feet”. This song really shows a different side to the Wifes. It’s contemplative and full of melancholy. Kim sings a moving and lyrical melody that is graceful and elegant. This is a real contrast to Scumpop. We all are thinking it’s a perfect song for the beginning of the album. A gentle intro to the world of the Wifes.

Other news is we have formed our own label which is called BearCage Recordings Ltd. So, of course, Scumpop will be released on this label. Should be out around 10th January when we shall be performing some special live shows in London. Watch out for forthcoming dates.

Lots of love

Satanic

It’s me AGAIN! I guess maybe everybody else is too tired to do this week’s diary entry, or maybe they just don’t love you as much as I do!

Anyway we were back in the studio on Saturday finishing off Scumpop, and we did Black Silk Stocking, which will be the other song on the single. It sounds brilliant; part of me likes it better than Scumpop! It’s got this sort of slowed down scary voice on it too, which is completely cool, its brilliant working with Dominique because you just say something and he kind of just does it! Anyway we took it for a test drive down at Duckie that night and it sounded fantastic.

We (I actually mean everybody except me!) are in the middle of sorting out all the legal stuff at the moment and distribution things, I never knew it was so complicated to put out a single! There are loads of things to do. We are having another meeting on Tuesday about it all, and hopefully do some work on 200'000 Feet. Hooray! It was really cool the other night because Chelsea
Kelsey came round to my house and we watched my new House of Elliot box set, it’s so cool, SIX disc Set! At the moment Bea and Evie are working on their "nocturne" collection, but a bad review in the fashion press has put the whole collection in jeopardy! I will let you know what happens OKAY!

Love Kim Phaggs

Also, Chelsea Kelsey and I are having to get ready for the Kate Bush night at the ICA on the 15th. It should be great; it will be nice to see Kiki and Herb again too, as they are doing a performance there. It’s funny actually because when we were round at the studio the other day Jez was working on Nostalgia (which features Kiki on guest vocals), doing a bit of work on the chorus, it sounds cool.

I think in the next couple of weeks once the studio stuff is all out of the way we should maybe have some LIVE GIG announcements to make. Who can wait for that?... NOT ME!

The Wifes and Severin spent a productive nine hours in Wolf studios, down in Brixton last Saturday. Dominic Brethes has done an amazing job of engineering the track, but how many times did we hear it? I'd guess a zillion or so.

After much chocolate, crisps, fags and no doubt too many E numbers, Kim and Chelsea re-did their vocals. Then we all crowded into the sound booth to add shouts and general raucousness - come on, it is Scumpop after all!

Ritchie rather voyeuristically took photos to mark the occasion - I expect they will appear soon.

Then after a rather nice take out curry it was down to Duckie with Champagne at the ready (classy or what) to celebrate the recording and Severin’s birthday and then Kim and Chelsea played it on the decks. Hope everyone liked it.

The video to go with it is finally finished. Next thing we need to do is the B-side and then get the single released. That will probably be very early in the New Year. Watch this space!

Lots of love and stuff,

Satanic

Personally, I’ve had a ball. I went to the Edinburgh Festival with my boyfriend who, incidentally, was offensively shit-faced and kept on shouting out during Tim Fountain’s controversial play about Gaydar. I even went to a couple of clubs over the August Bank Holiday. Horse Meat Disco was excellent. Ah! the smell of bum-sex in the air and the sound of Abba’s The Visitors really, really loud. Also terrific was our friend Sammy-Jo’s set at Marvellous. Really great choice of tracks, brilliantly put together.

I’ve been watching DVDs of Strangers With Candy from the USA and Kath & Kim from Australia. I’ve been listening to Mylo (still), that great Deep Dish song (Flashdance), The Prodigy and Libertines albums and singles by Har Mar Superstar, Aberfeldy, Tiga, The 411 and – scream! – Mousse T. I’ve become re-obsessed with Suede’s Breakdown on the first album.

Oh, a couple of media schmedia band-y things. On Saturday we were all interviewed (all except Tone who was in Iceland spending a shocking ten pounds per pint of beer and Jez who had a touch of disco flu) we were interviewed for Disorder, a cracking new website and magazine charting the shenanigans of the London Underground. We were all VERY impressed when their journo Maria revealed that she knew the mighty Earl Brutus. In fact, we screamed. Anyway, Disorder’s mission is to recreate the ethos and excitement that the early issues of The Face used to have, without sucking too much advertisers’ cock so we’re behind them all the way. Check out the site at www.disordermagazine.co.uk and look out for the Wifes feature in print, coming ‘soon’.

Yesterday I took part in a panel discussion for Attitude along with Louis Walsh, Anthony Crank from T4, Andrew out of that boy-band Phixx and - scream!- Jeremy Joseph. The subject was The State Of British Pop and, to be brutally frank, when I saw the other contributors I almost didn’t go, presuming that I would have absolutely nothing in common with any of them. In the end it was a scream, with everyone arguing about everybody from Morrissey to Jamelia. And whodathunk that I’d ever end up sitting next to Jeremy Joseph without one of us having recourse to knives or strangulation? We even found some common ground in our pop tastes (Bananarama) although I did once have to say “Shut up Jeremy and let me FINISH”. I really, really warmed to Louis Walsh too: what a funny old world!

Spookily, as I was scrabbling about for news of great import there, Jez just phoned with bona-fide news. He's starting the single mix of Scumpop this weekend! You know we've been getting requests for this at Duckie already don’t you? And not just from our mums either.

Our first band meeting in a month is tonight, so maybe there’ll be some more and perhaps better news next week?

Before I go can I just say, “Oh hi Kelly, what are you doing up so early?”

Pip pip!

I've just completed work on a four-song demo (Women Who Went To The Chair/Scumpop/7 Hours To Showtime/Shiner) which I'm rather proud of. Sound files should be posted on the site in the next few days. I’m now working on a second demo which will hopefully include I Love You At 200 000 Feet, a slightly reworked version of 16, Stepford High Street and Next Time.

If all that wasn’t enough, we have a bunch of new songs to get our teeth into - I Do Not Love Gold I Just Love You, an uptempo electro/rock thing, a very rude song in 6/8 time and a ballad called Snags. On top of all that, a third demo is planned which may include Everything Is Great, Black Silk Stocking and our collaboration with Kikki/Justin Bond called Nostalgia.

So if you see me out and about over the next few weeks, please buy me a pint and then point me in the direction of Wifes Central HQ ‘cause I’ve lots of work to do!

Jeremy x

Kim Phaggs in the area!

Check it out, we have put up a list of what we've been playing down at Duckie in the past month or so... it’s a pretty cool list we think.

Okay, its time to take it AROUND TOWN!

Look at Amy and the Wifes on the new bank note from The Bank of
England! Not really! It’s just some of the currency you will be able to
spend at DUCKIE’S GAY SHAME and LESBIAN WEAKNESS on the 3rd of July - the annual festival of homosexual misery taking place at The Coronet (used to be a big old cinema now a really cool music/art venue) at the Elephant and Castle.

For full information go to www.duckie.co.uk. It should be a
really great evening with loads of stuff happening - oh yes and the Wifes will be DJing AND making a rather surprising live band appearance! Which is a bit of a pain actually because we fancied a night out at G.A.Y - the line up looks really innovative, fresh and exciting this year HA! HA! HA!

By the time you are reading this you should be able to view the latest
photo gallery from Jonathan, showing us to FULL EFFECT at Duckie a couple of weeks ago, let us know what you think, IN FACT, why not post a message on THE FORUM?....RIGHT NOW??

Oh and you know what? If you haven’t read The Long Firm by Jake Arnott, READ IT! The Wifes all agree that it is one of the best books from the past ten years. It’s a 60's gangster/homo/starlet masterpiece. It’s being serialized on BBC2 and starts on Wednesday 7th July, and we absolutely LOVE the soundtrack. It’s got The Marvellettes, Sam The Sham, John Leyton, Thunderclap Newman, Small Faces, The Ratles and loads of other brilliant stuff (the CD is out on July 5th). To be honest, if this show is shit we're killing ourselves!

And finally, the words to the rap on Shiner are changing! Watch this
space...

Love always Kim Phaggs

Welcome Ritchie! Did we tell you Ritchie Franklin’s come on board as a helper? Seeing as we’re all pathetically disorganised, or lazy, or both, we thought we needed to bring someone in to run the diaries, make things happen and generally crack the whip. We immediately thought of Ritchie who is known as much for his whip wielding, bossiness and nit-picking as he is for his all-round loveliness. Already we have lists! Agendas! Itineraries! Packs! Fabric swatches! Anyway, Duckie punters will know him as the one with the orange eyes wearing vintage Westwood.

Spent most of last week (commencing May 31) rehearsing for the upcoming Duckie show. The regular rehearsals appear to be paying off as we’re sounding pretty tight and me and Phaggs are remembering the words at last. The biggie, for us at least, was getting Black Silk Stocking right. It’s our cover version of an Italian new wave / pop / disco hit by Crisma (later changed, inexplicably, to Krisma) from 1978. I rewrote some of the words ‘coz they were kind of strange, but not in a good way. There’s a bit where me and Phaggs sing different verses at the same time; kinda confusing. The reason I love our version of this curio is that Jez, Satanic and Tone get to actually wig out towards the end. It’s so liberating and loose sounding.

Saturday came along and the gig went great. To our shock and awe Steven Severin of The Banshees came down to see us and – thank God – we didn’t fuck up. Apparently he had a good time and enjoyed the show. Hearts aflutter, we are preparing demos.

The setlist was:

Bitch At The Brits (a Jez souped up version)
The Women Who Went To The Chair
Scumpop
Seven Hours To Showtime / Black Silk Stocking (segue)

We finished with an encore of Let’s End The Night Together. See what we did there?

The dramatic new look was:

White shirts
Tartan (Royal Stuart) ties
Jeans

Thanks to everyone who came down. The tavern was packed. Thanks especially to Simon Le Bon I mean Vans, Bryon, Jongathon (as usual), Ritchie (as usual), Simon strange (as usual).

Then on Sunday we all felt kind of flat like Tip Top Cola and wished we could do it all again.

I’m DJ-ing at The Lift Party this Friday under the moniker of Readers Wifes. Phaggs is away so I’m doing it with Lush dressed up as he. Wonder if it will fool anyone at all…

Pip pip!

We've got a great new song to premier at these shows too. Not giving too much away just yet, I think it's the sexiest / most raucous the Wifes have been to date... SO SHOCKING!

Other than that we recently went on a Wifes night out to the cinema! We all went to see the new print of PERFORMANCE, and gorgeous it was too. sex, drugs, violence, rock'n'roll, cross dressing... it had it all (sounds familiar actually...?). Needless to say we all ended up in the pub afterwards and thence... who knows where? Who can remember?

Tone X

And, we have been working on another new track, and guess what, it features Justin (aka Kiki from Kiki and Herb) on vocals, it's called Nostalgia, and is shaping up to be possibly our best song EVER! Where have you heard that before! I know...

Anyway, this is really exciting, Chelsea and I are featured in the "friends and fans" gallery pages at www.thisisblythe.com, and if you don’t know who Blythe is, well you'd better check it out as soon as you can. It is so cool.

That’s enough for now, Love Kim Phaggs .

We filmed in a proper studio, just off the Old Kent Road, last Saturday. All of us had been out the night before at Kiki and Herb’s show and everyone turned up feeling really hung over, so the sensible thing to do was to keep on drinking. This really helped with artistic motivation, as we were required to jump around a lot, eat chips and beat up Tony! He didn’t seem to mind, although I think he was quite relieved when after the fourth take, Lady Pat said he had enough footage for that particular scene.
Anyway when we saw the footage at the end of the day we were all pretty pleased with the results.
We also had time for a new set of band photos, which will be appearing in the gallery section really soon.

Also we have a couple of dates lined up to tell you about, on Friday 16th April we are doing a short set at The Cock (at the Ghetto), Princess Julia and Sammy Jo are DJ’ing that night so it should be good fun. And then on the 22nd April we are on at Mark Moore’s club Electro Go Go, at Madame Jo Jo’s we love it down there and hope you can come…

Love Kim Phaggs x

Friday we dusted off “16”. It's always been a favourite of the bands and we're thinking of including it in our Madame JoJo's set. It sounded rather lovely, but that could've been the vodka messing with my melon… Anyway, after a short break (and more vodka for Tone and myself, Bacardi for the boys in wigs) I played everyone my ideas for "feed me" which we plan to be a sleazy bass-heavy electro track. I'll keep you posted on its progress (or lack of).

Anthony and I returned to the studio on Wednesday night to record additional guitar parts on "Stepford High Street" (a song that becomes more epic by the day) and rework the chorus to "7 Hours to Showtime" After an abortive attempt at making a cheap acoustic guitar sound anything other than a cheap acoustic guitar we ended the evening with “Next Time”. I demanded Carlos Alomar meets Nile Rodgers in a funk/rock showdown and Tone delivered a rather fantastic guitar line. I think his wrist was a bit sore by the end of the session but it’s all in the name of rock and roll...

These are the songs we've been working on recently:

"I Love You at 200 000 Feet" is our tribute to Giorgio Moroder (and in
particular his work on Donna Summer's "Now I Need You").

"Next Time" is great pop tune with 8 tracks of handclaps and a nifty lyrical
reference to Cher.

"The Women Who Went to the Chair" is possibly my favourite Readers Wifes
song so far; all thumping drums and a moody lyric inspired by a documentary on the Cockettes.

"Merry Christmas Everybody/Happy New Year/Feed Me" was a medley recorded for The Cock's Christmas party which seemed to go down very well. We're going to develop the Feed Me section into a full blown Wifes number in the very near future.

If it feels like ages since we finished demo-ing these babies then it is. We’ve been playing them live for a year or so now. However, we felt we really needed to get some more writing and live experience under our belts before we released another single. So that’s what we did in 2003.

Anyhow, we’re heading into the studio next week to work with our friend Dom to turn live favourites Scumpop and Let’s Spend into shimmering slices of pop action. Can’t wait. Watch this space to see what happens next.

Readers Wifes First Video

To coincide with the single, we’re working with somebody called Ladypat. Pat’s already worked with the likes of Atomizer and Crazygirl and specialises in truly off-the-wall graphics combined with a real punk rock approach to the somewhat boring and tired formula. He is a genius. You can see some of his work here. Work on this starts within a fortnight. We can’t wait.

Readers Wifes Celebrity Fit Club:

We were interviewed about Amy for this ITV show. They came to Duckie last week to film (with Vanessa Feltz in tow. Scream!). Somebody jumped into the DJ booth and pointed a camera in our faces and asked us what we thought of a heavily Photoshop-ed picture of Amy as she will look like when she reaches her target weight. We didn’t really express very strong opinions about Amy’s weight (she looks fine by us anyway) but we did object most strongly to the ludicrous M&S clothes they’d stuck her in. Apparently this was screened on ITV on Feb 3rd but I missed it.

Jim Stanton from The Cock, had asked us to play at the event maybe a month or so before, it sounded like a really good laugh, as we all really enjoyed it last time around. Anyway, we were told that he wanted all the acts that night to do a cover version of their favourite Christmas song, so we all went away and had a think about what we might want to play. We met up the next week in the studio and of course everyone had a different idea of what might be a cool song to cover, of course the evening ended up with everyone quite drunk and more enthusiastic about certain Christmas number ones than they should be, me especially, and I’m not saying which songs, blush.

Never ones to take the easy option, we eventually decided that we would do a medely! Merry Christmas Everyone by Shaking Stevens into Happy New Year by Abba into a cocaine addiction rap called Feed Me.

As it was a Saturday and Chelsea and I were DJ’ing at Duckie, so we arranged that Jock and Peden would take over from us at around midnight, as we were due onstage at around one o’clock. OF COURSE it was pissing down, so we both ran up to Crash, and met up with Jeremy. Mark Satanic couldn’t make it as he was roped into some family Christmas do, and was out of London.

We arrived in time to see Synthetic Pleasures doing “Cunty Christmas Party”, which was brilliant, and Atomizer doing I Believe in Father Christmas by Greg Lake, but I think my favourite was The Most when they did Wham!’s Last Christmas, Julia looked brilliant, as usual, with black gaffer tape over her tits.

Then it was our turn.We did Lets Spend the Night Together, Scumpop, Bitch at the Brits and for our finale’ we put on woolly scarves, as part of our dramatic look! It was really great and felt quite festive, especially as it was a couple of days after Christmas and everyone was probably sick to death with all the festive stuff.

Adam Sky was on after us, he did Wanking In The Air, from the Snowman cartoon, then we just kind of hung around getting even more pissed till it was time to go home. Oh yes, we also had to wait ages for a taxi, I HATE THAT.

Thursday 1st January: Readers Wifes play Electro Go Go at Madame Jo Jo’s

Chelsea and I had been DJ’ing at the Duckie New Years Eve Do, the night before, which was brilliant, but I remember waking up in Peckham at about three in the afternoon, remembering we had run out of make up, and I was going to have to try and find a Boots or a Superdrug somewhere. Just what you want to be doing on New Years day after about three hours sleep!

Anyway I got it, went home and had something horrible out of the microwave, and hooray it was time to go to the studio to meet Chelsea, Jeremy and Mark. I think we all felt about as rough as each other but we still managed to have a fairly good run through.

Madame Jo Jo’s is brilliant, the sound man there is LOVELY, so we had a really good sound check then went to Pizza Express. After our pizza and a couple of beers we all felt much better and went round to the club.

The crowd was mainly full of people who looked like they hadn’t been to bed since they put the Oxford Street lights on, one woman in particular was trying to scab fags from anyone, and her friend who just kept going ”theres the man! That’s the man who knows!!" While pointing away at anyone, Chelsea and I thought this was HILARIOUS and kept saying it ALL NIGHT.
Mark Moore was DJ’ing and he introduced us. We did the same set as from Cock Christmas, although we didn’t do the Merry Christmas medely. We thought that was pushing the festive envelope a bit TOO FAR. I love playing at Madame JoJo’s as the sound is always brilliant, and it was really nice because during Bitch at the Brits I looked over and saw Kurt and he was POLE DANCING! He’s quite good at it too.

Later on we went back to the studio and Chelsea had the brilliant idea of buying a big bottle of Bacardi earlier for us all, so we all stayed up late getting pissed on Bacardi, I LOVE THAT.

Hope you all are well, it’s been ages since I posted anything on the diary so I thought I’d write about two of the gigs we have done.

God, absolutely ages ago, last August to be exact, we did a set in the first “Cock – Live” at Crash. Wow, what a night! Four bands. Electronic music. Live. Plus a great club night. Headlining that night was the amazing Scissor Sisters.

We did a blinding set that debuted “Stepford High Street” which works really well live. It rocks! I think it became our favourite songs of the moment back then. All our new songs become our favourite songs of the moment, though.

In November, we returned, almost exactly a year to the day, to the Water Rats to do a set at “Uncle Bob’s Wedding Reception”. Not any dramatic new looks this time but a dramatic new start to the set. Phaggs and Kimberley began with the, then, new song, “Love you at 200 000 Feet”. Plenty of pathos in that song. Then on came Chelsea and myself to join the in rest of the set. We included Bitch, Stepford and Scumpop in the set. Last night Phaggs, Kimberley and I watched a video of the gig. God, how sad is that?

Lots of love.

Satanic.