Late in December 2006, while most offices were closed for the holidays, the Independent Press Association (IPA) quietly sent an e-mail to its member publications announcing that the organization was closing its doors. Despite previous optimism expressed by the IPA’s board of directors, for many of the publishers whose titles the organization distributed, it came as little surprise. For them, the IPA’s sudden announcement was endemic to a total communications breakdown between the organization and its client publications that began in early 2005. Publications represented by the IPA continue to contend with the likelihood that thousands of dollars they are owed will never be seen. For some, such as Kitchen Sink (and Punk Planet itself), this comes as the IPA’s final, and fatal, blow. The fallout has been profound-the independent publishing community has experienced an unprecedented bloodletting in recent months, as magazines run on a shoestring have been unable to overcome huge losses in operating income.

In the newsstand distribution business, bankruptcies are nothing new. But in the case of the IPA, the dissolution also speaks to a much deeper crisis of mission. For publishers of IPA-distributed titles, the irony is palpable. An organization once established as an advocate for the independent press, the IPA has brought an array of the publications it was founded to support down with it. The sense of betrayal and frustration goes deep—-hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to distributed titles has disappeared, only likely to be repaid on a percentage of the dollar by the fiduciary firm Uecker and Associates, which was assigned to distribute what remain of the IPA’s assets.

Founded in 1996 by John Anner, the IPA was established as a non-profit Social Justice organization for publishers and writers. The IPA offered counsel on the nuts and bolts of publishing to up-and-coming publishers while engaging in social works programs such as the New Voices in Independent Journalism, which arranged for grants for journalism students of color. It wasn’t until 1999 that the IPA got into distribution, buying out beleaguered for-profit newsstand distributor BigTop (which was later renamed Indy Press Newsstand Services.) The organization stated that the IPA could better cater to the national newsstand distribution needs of its member titles than the large, for-profit magazine distribution behemoths.

Anner left the organization in 2003, replaced by Jeremy Adam Smith, who served as Interim Executive Director and was charged with finding a permanent director. Smith and the board chose Richard Landry to head the organization, with the hopes that Landry’s management experience in the for-profit sector as founder of PC World magazine would prove useful in the IPA’s foray into newsstand distribution. Though BigTop/Indy Press Newsstand Services was successful in increasing circulation of its titles, in early 2005 a handful of publishers began to notice that payments were coming late. In some cases, the late payments were written off by many as isolated incidents. “At the time,” says Bitch publisher Debbie Rasmussen, “we weren’t really in communication with other publishers. We didn’t know it was a broader occurrence, so we weren’t that alarmed.” Carla Costa, publisher of Kitchen Sink magazine, had a similar experience. “Payments starting coming in later and later,” she says. “At that point, the communication was still OK, in terms of getting closing statements for issues on the newsstand and potential payment dates-even though the payments were coming late they were still forthcoming with that information.”

On October 15, 2005, Landry posted to the IPA listserv, addressing the late payment issues. In the post, he stated, “The reasons for this are numerous, but they really boil down to the fact that independent newsstand distributors like Indy Press require a lot of working cash themselves in order to be able to deal with the very long return and payment cycles that are standard for our business,” assuring member titles that “I and members of the board have been working to find better, long-term ways to support the cash-flow needs of Indy Press so that we could be sure to make timely payments to you, our members and publishers.”

After months of pursuing a partnership with an established distribution company to shore up the IPA’s finances and improve the payment and accounting backend of the distribution chain, in March of 2006 Landry announced to the members that the IPA had signed into a partnership with Canadian distributor Disticor. The company was to handle billing and financial responsibility for the titles while IPNS would continue to manage marketing for their titles and continue their advocacy role for the publications.

According to Landry, the deal would provide the IPA with a cash infusion that would allow them to repay their debts to the distributed titles. Implied in this deal, in the eyes of many publishers, was that the titles that signed the new Disticor contracts would receive preferential payment schedules.

Many publishers balked at the Disticor deal, reluctant to renew their business relationship with the IPA by signing into a brand-new, three-year contract. Some decided that they would rather risk eating the funds owed them than sign a new contract jointly with Disticor and the IPA. Former Tikkun publisher Joel Schalit (a former associate publisher of Punk Planet) was one of those individuals. “We made the decision to not go with them before the Disticor deal was announced,” says Schalit. “We didn’t have confidence that a bailout would ameliorate their problems. We had suspicions that our sales reporting from BigTop wasn’t correct, and we would still be dealing with them. I knew that by pulling out on the distribution deal, I was giving up a lot of money that was owed to us.”

For magazines without the strong subscriber base Tikkun would fall back on, Writing off the Big Top debt was not an option, and many begrudgingly gambled they would be paid for amounts owed them. “The Disticor deal was offered so we would get paid,” says Giant Robot publisher Eric Nakamura. “I felt like there was no choice … there might have been a payment schedule, but it was the kind of schedule that leaves you with a huge debt when you don’t get paid.” Unfortunately for those magazines, the transition period between signing to the Disticor contract and receiving payment for the quickly increasing amounts the IPA owed was economically crippling.

Payments promised for one date failed to materialize months later. New sales representatives were assigned to member’s accounts for a short period of time, only to disappear with no fanfare save for bounce-back e-mail responses. Requests for statements would garner no response for weeks, and when numbers were provided, they often came without an account breakdown or any statement detail. “They were making late payments, not communicating with us, making promises about when payments would come and breaking those promises, misinterpreting our contract and trying to take credit on returns that were long closed in order to whittle down what they thought they owed us,” says Bitch‘s Rasmussen. For Kitchen Sink, the situation quickly turned dire. Costa explains, “not only did the payments become severely late, to the point where we had to significantly delay two issues, but the communication also really deteriorated. We stopped being able to get closing statements in a timely manner, because at that point I think they were running out of money so quickly that they couldn’t give you a potential pay-out date, so they just wouldn’t communicate at all. When they closed, I only had one of two closing statements I needed from them.”

“In the end, it took a month for e-mails and phone calls I sent out on a weekly basis to be returned. It put us in a position where even though we’re willing to fundraise to print our issues, it put us on a backlog of payments for two full issues, and it’s a financial crunch that we can’t really beat,” Costa describes.

From the Inside Looking Out

For a number of former IPA employees, the organization’s decline was equally perplexing. Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, who served as a technical assistance consultant for the IPA from 2004 to 2005, discovered the cash flow problems indirectly. “In July of 2005, they didn’t pay me for my consulting job. I got very concerned. I started asking questions among people in the organization. I started hearing that things weren’t good and there were problems with distribution and I realized there was a financial problem they were trying to hush up. They were hiring more and more bookkeepers, and they said it was just a cash flow problem with the bookkeepers, and that the situation was working itself out. When I started to contact people for the December 2005 conference, then I started to hear back from people that the IPA was paying late.”

Sales representative Lauren Cooper, who left the IPA in April of 2005, saw warning signs in late 2004. “My job was to get publishers to do more promotions and get more copies out and publishers would say, “‘that’s great and all but you haven’t paid me for two issues,’” says Cooper. She began experiencing communications problems of her own. “It just sort of snowballed from that point, and I couldn’t get answers. Previously I could go up to accounting and say, “I’ve got this publisher on the phone and they want to know when they’re going to get paid’ and there was always some sort of answer, even if it was ‘give me a couple of days.’ But it became no communication flow ever.”

Former Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis served on the IPA board from November 2004 until January 2oo6 as co-chair of the Member Advisory Committee. She contends that during her stint on the board, she was similarly kept in the dark about financial matters. Jervis states that she “soon realized that for my own comfort level with my fiduciary responsibilities to the organization, I was not getting nearly enough information about the organization’s finances. I do not feel like enough information was shared with the board about what was going on. It led to delays in the situation being taken as seriously as it needed to be, and I think that made the outcome a lot worse for a lot of publications. There were constant struggles over communication, both in getting info for the board, and in getting info to the membership.”

The View on High

In the past year, no small amount of publisher and staff frustration has been directed towards Landry and the IPA Board. Critics assert that Landry’s tightly regulated, top-down management approach led to a lack of transparency and a crisis of confidence that only exacerbated the IPA’s newsstand distribution issues. One of Landry’s sharpest critics is Smith, who states that hiring Landry stands as “one of the greatest regrets of my working life.”

“When BigTop or IPNS got into trouble, Richard’s response, which was consistent with what I experienced as a member of the staff, was to shut down communications and make sure that there was no information going in or out, which had a number of horrible consequences, one of which is that it led members to distrust the organization, another of which was that an incredible amount of bad publicity was generated, which would turn to philanthropic funders reading that publicity and concluding that IPA wasn’t a good investment.”

Landry responded to criticism on February, 2007 in an interview with the San FranciscoChronicle, stating that “The IPA I joined was a very distressed organization, and I spent the past three and a half years trying to pull it out of a difficult financial situation.”

Smith, however, has little sympathy for Landry’s argument.

“When he became executive director there’s no question that he faced a lot of questions to be solved,” he says, emphasizing that “when you’re an executive director or leader of any organization, that’s your job-to solve problems.”

Despite their personal criticisms, both Cooper and Jervis emphasize that Landry inherited a dire economic situation when he became Director of the IPA. “The seeds for BigTop’s problems were sown a long time ago-in my opinion, back when the IPA acquired BigTop in the first place,” says Jervis. “There seems to have been a profound underestimate of the financial expertise needed to manage that kind of business, and the organization just never had it and never put the proper systems in place. Richard Landry inherited a financial mess-I don’t think anyone even knew how big a mess it was.”

“There were always cash flow problems,” says Cooper. “Some of the accounting problems were inherited from when BigTop was a for-profit and the IPA bought it.” Kaiser concurs. “To be perfectly honest, when Landry took over the IPA it was in serious financial trouble,” she says. “Anyone in that position would have had to fire some people, make some hard decisions.”

Despite her concessions, Cooper retains strong criticisms of Landry’s handling of the crisis. “The position of the organization under Richard’s leadership was to preserve the organization first, the publications second,” she states. “I can understand trying to make sure there’s some money in the bank, but do you start taking the people who make you that money for granted?”

The Fallout

Since the announcement that the IPA was shuttering its operations, the fallout in the independent press community has been profound. A number of magazines, such as Kitchen Sink, have opted to cease publication. Costa states that the factors contributing to their decision have as much to do with exhaustion as unpaid revenue. “At the time of the IPA closure, we had Kitchen Sink 15 at the printer and didn’t have any money to ship it because they couldn’t pay us, so we had a printed magazine we couldn’t pay for at the printer. What we were able to do with a big number of small donations was payoff our printer and mail it off to subscribers.”

In another stroke of irony, as with many publishers who signed to the Disticor deal, Costa has found new distributor Disticor (which will continue to distribute titles that signed into the new contract) to be forthcoming with payments. Revenue from the first Kitchen Sink issue distributed by Disticor will fund the printing costs of their upcoming final issue. But unfortunately for Kitchen Sink and other strapped publishers, due to the often arcane process of newsstand distribution, in which magazines are paid for issues sold many months after the magazines go off the shelves, the revenue lost during the transition from the IPNS is far too much to make up.

Instead, the Costa and the editorial staff of Kitchen Sink are refocusing their energies on the Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project, the non-profit organization that Kitchen Sink became an energy- and money- consuming project of. While the former magazine staff will continue to work with the non-profit, Costa states that the publication has decisively met its end. “We won’t ever revive Kitchen Sink magazine. We just can’t. It’s a money problem-not for lack of will, because we’ve worked really hard on it for five years. I think it’s time to move on, because it’s exhausting and I think having a chance to work on new plans will revitalize everybody. It’s too expensive for us to do as a group of volunteers.”

Not all affected publications are shutting their doors. For Bitch, the unpaid revenue has been crippling, but hasn’t dealt a fatal blow. In February, Rasmussen told Punk Planet, “We got our notification saying they owed us $35,000, and our records show that they owe us $81,000.” Months later, she has yet to get any indication of how much of that money the magazine may receive. “We haven’t had any contact with their attorneys,” she says. “I’d sent a couple of messages to Susan Uecker but I’ve only gotten generic responses back. I’ve heard conflicting reports about what (if any) money we should expect. Some people think publishers won’t see any of it; others seem to believe that we’ll probably get 10 cents on the dollar of what the IPA claimed to owe us.”

As Costa and the Kitchen Sink staff wrap up fundraising efforts to get issue 16 out the door, they don’t expect to know how much they will-or won’t-receive until the end of summer at the earliest. “We’ll have to wait until claims are processed before we hear back,” she says. “I’m assuming none of us will know what happens until the end of the summer but I’m not very optimistic about it.”

Members of the Independent Publisher’s Network, the group that a number of former IPA members and publishers have organized in the wake, found that among the assets being sold off in order to repay the publishers are the mailing list contacts of those publishers themselves, in yet another twist that emphasizes how far the legacy of the IPA has strayed from the organization’s original mandate. Responses on the group range from bemusement to renewed anger among former IPA members whose contact information is potentially being sold to spammers and direct marketing companies in order to help pay for the debts they themselves are owed.

On the Independent Publisher’s Network online forum, former staffers and publishers are rebuilding that community that was crucial to the IPA’s mission in its’ formative period, before it became embroiled in economic controversy, before it tried its hand at the distribution business. But for these publishers, still recovering from the IPA fallout, the community must contend with a host of crises threatening the entire publishing world. Even as they work themselves out of an economic quagmire, the crucial question confronting these publishers is how to preserve the independent press as a viable concern while it faces multiple threats-from scarce distribution options, from increased bulk mailing rates, from the Internet, from continually declining advertising income.

Smith states that progressive publications have to become increasingly savvy about their bottom line. “Freestanding independent titles have to be smart about it,” he says. “The winning formula at the moment is that you keep a tight rein on your expenses–that you diversify as much as possible, that you have some kind of subsidy in the form of donations or in the form of institutional sponsorship, or some sort of cash cow, and that you have a very well-defined mission and niche. If you believe that there has to be an independent press, then it’s simply a matter of finding a way,” he says. “In that sense, you can’t focus on the negative, you have to seize on that and try to develop that. I just think we’re in a very tough period right now.”

Yet as an already-tough business grows only more difficult, Rasmussen emphasizes that both publishers and readers must take stock of what has been lost and commit themselves again to supporting independent voices. “I’m committed not just to independent media but radical and anti-capitalist media,” says Rasmussen, “and I worry about the declining number of outlets for these perspectives. Independent print publishing is enormously difficult and costly, even more so when you’re challenging conventions, like consumerism, or subsidizing your publication with corporate ad sales. We all need to realize that if we want these publications to continue, we have to do our part to support them.”

Thousands of miles from the West Coast, the extreme climes of Chicago offer few traces of the perpetual garden that is Santa Cruz. So it was a moment of true cognitive dissonance to enter Chicago’s legendary Reckless Records and discover a prominent display touting the "Santa Cruz psychedelic sound," featuring the far-out guitar histrionics of Comets on Fire and Residual Echoes along with the meditative folk of Ben Chasny’s Six Organs of Admittance.

Distributed through some of the largest indie labels in the industry (Comets are on Seattle’s legendary Sub Pop, Six Organs on the Chicago-based Drag City), these acts have spawned worldwide fascination with a scene that in Santa Cruz managed to thrive over the past few years in the obscurity of house shows and a small yet tight-knit community. Even for the handful of locals who have been following the rise of these musicians, such international attention comes as something of a surprise.

Ironically, the best known of these bands–Comets on Fire and Six Organs of Admittance–have since moved to the Bay Area, yet their wide-ranging repute began while they still resided in the city limits. Despite opening slots for national marquee acts such as Low, Six Organ’s Ben Chasny (see sidebar) retained a low profile in town, anonymously working at Streetlight Records and performing occasional house shows. Similarly, Comets on Fire signed to Alternative Tentacles and received references in the national press back in 2002, while lead singer Ethan Miller was still selling cardboard-dry pizza at the infamous Storti’s Pizza in the Metro Center.

Santa Cruz has always had its hometown heroes, the local bands who can sell out the Catalyst, which, with a capacity of 800, would constitute an impressive draw in any town. Yet many of these local celebs have found themselves limited to big fish in a small pond syndrome, as if the Santa Cruz Mountains hold some ancient curse that prevents bands from breaking through their enclosing walls, only allowing the occasional Good Riddance or Camper Van Beethoven to take the 17 to worldwide fame. Talk to enough local musicians and you’ll come to believe this curse is true.

So how did some of this town’s most obscure bands end up branching out into the world at large? The answer is hard to believe in an age when even the most haphazard career is groomed by a publicist’s pen: They did it by nurturing quiet, underground communities that organically stretched across the globe, appealing to everyone from the closet psychedelic heads at Rolling Stone to the art rockers at Arthur magazine to obsessive Japanese collectors looking for the most obscure Six Organs of Admittance CD-R they can get their hands on.

Early Comets on Fire shows bore little resemblance to Santa Cruz’s traditional population of laid-back, reggae-rock bands, whose music seems tailor-made for the town’s mellower (and often smokier) venues.

Ragged and lurching, the band would lay into muscular, churning guitar freakouts that in their most basic form resembled some pure bastardization of classic rock–"stoner rock" requiring something much harder than the green leaf to fully comprehend. With the white-noise squall that emitted from Neil Harmonson’s echoplex (a fierce little sound-generating box that dates back to the early ’60s), the band may have been too challenging to fill the halls of the Catalyst, but they crackled with an intensity that was impossible to dismiss. After years of slugging it out at house shows, the Jury Room and Caffé Pergolesi, Comets on Fire got their break when Jello Biafra came across their self-titled first record, and promptly rereleased it on his Alternative Tentacles label. (Full Disclosure: As former booker for Pergolesi, I set up a number of the shows for Comets on Fire and Six Organs of Admittance at the cafe.) Positive mentions in national magazines such as Spin and the worship of the indie tastemakers at Pitchfork came quick as the band broke through to the larger world. After a long-running tour with Six Organs of Admittance–shows where it was difficult to tell where the Six Organs set ended and the Comets set began–Sub Pop came calling, eventually releasing the band’s 2004 album, Blue Cathedral.

Miller says the psychedelic scene that has sprung up in town wasn’t exactly burgeoning back when Comets played sweaty sets at the Jury Room. "Most of the psych-rock, folk-rock scene seemed to spring up with a little more vibrancy after most of the guys from Comets were gone and we were no longer living there–with Whysp, Mammatus, Residual Echoes, etc.," states Miller. "The scene as I knew it was made up of a smallish group of friends and party acquaintances–it seems like things were always scattering there as soon as a scene or movement of people in music was trying to develop. I think partly that was because of how expensive it was to live in town, and after kids graduate or stick around for a few years they often move on."

In one sense, it’s an often-told story, both in these pages and on the deck of a certain downtown cafe, of local bands who are unable to find a decent venue in Santa Cruz proper that appreciates their unique vision, or a local scene that can sustain them for a long period of time. The difference is that, this time, the bands have managed to move on to greater things.

But for the bands that have stayed behind in Santa Cruz, finding a larger hometown audience remains a problem. "I’m just not sure this town is interested in these sounds," says Josh Alper of local Renaissance folkies Whysp. "Perhaps it’s because we aren’t really fitting the bill of what the kids want. The sounds don’t seem as appealing in this day and age as the more insane psych-rock that can be really compelling and wonderful to experience. Both Hugh [Holden] and I had our time in a crazy, deconstructo rock band [The Lowdown], and at this point I think we are less interested in just making a freakout to see what you can do with the music. It can be so easy to just make some insanely loud sounds and just go nuts, and in a way the absurdity of the times calls for this. But it also reflects all the noise and insanity and just adds more. And I wanted to go with a different spirit at this point."

Despite the difficulties of finding a following in Santa Cruz, local holdouts Mammatus remain tied to their home base of Corralitos, even as they return from a successful nationwide tour, enjoying the attention of psych-heads the world over. "We have no plans of ever leaving Corralitos," says founding member Aaron Emmert. "We have been quite blessed to be able to establish a base out here where we can play as long and as loud as we want. Being out here allows us to be completely immersed in our own world, uninterrupted by the vacant stagnant air of the big city. We are close to our friends the trees, who shape our minds and hearts and encourage us to really go for it, to get further out, to shake to mountains looming ahead. It’s the perfect geographical location because we can be completely alone, and yet we can play shows 20 minutes away in Santa Cruz or two hours away in San Francisco."

The international success of many of these bands is not all luck, though. The Santa Cruz psychedelic sound has had a benefactor from afar in John Whitson, who heads the obscure-yet-influential Bay Area-based Holy Mountain label. Despite its tiny size, Holy Mountain has focused much of its roster on Santa Cruz bands, using its connections to beam homegrown acts such as Six Organs of Admittance, Residual Echoes, Mammatus and free-jazz freaks Zdrastvootie out to the New York hipsterati and those obsessive Japanese collectors. Even with the underground connections the Santa Cruz psych bands have nurtured through show trades and national zines such as the Ptolemaic Terra scope, many of these musicians credit Whitson with their worldwide notoriety.

"In the last couple of years, John’s been putting out a lot of Santa Cruz bands, which is awesome," says Six Organs main man Chasny. "It’s pretty cool that he’s been championing the Santa Cruz scene. A lot of what’s going on is [because of] John. Because John is putting this stuff out, it’s easier for people to coalesce that into one trajectory for everyone else to think of. I think he should get a lot of credit for that."

"We sent Holy Mountain our first demo, and John responded quite enthusiastically to it," says Mammatus’ Emmert. "It’s really awesome to be on Holy Mountain because John is just one of the bros, which makes the whole relationship based on a mutual understanding rather than being about numbers and, God forbid, business and stuff. There are small pockets around the country where people are way into Mammatus. I’d say considering the fact that we just started last year, that’s more than we could ever ask for. All over the country, there are those geeks at every show. After the show they don’t really talk to you, but they buy a shirt and a CD and a record, then they ask if there’s anything else they can buy. We never really know if those dudes are into it or if they’re just collecting stuff, but we love them because they allow us to buy some burgers."

Despite their acclaim, the support of prestigious labels and geographically wide followings, these bands are still grinding away as they did (or still do) in Santa Cruz, working day jobs while waiting for the next tour. While Comets on Fire may nowadays appear on a slot at the elite art-rock festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, Miller now deals with the trade-off of having a day-job not as lax as Storti’s Pizza. "I still have a day job," says Miller. "It’s not quite as killer as Storti’s, but it’s the same deal. You’re in southern England playing some awesome shit and having people cheer and scream and yell and taking a plane home. And then you’re clocked in delivering flowers in a white van a day later. It’s a little schizophrenic, but were not a big mainstream group that gets big money deals with a Coca-Cola commercial and hit singles–we’re a working-class rock band that people feel passionately about and we feel passionately back."

Though it’s easy to unite these bands under the banner of psych-rock or psych-folk from Santa Cruz, they’re primarily united by their love of obscure ’60s and ’70s folk and rock, as refracted through the vision of modern art-rock. Add to that a sense of community that eludes many whose idea of a vibrant music scene amounts to potential networking opportunities.

Just as Six Organs and Comets on Fire share a symbiotic relationship, Whysp draws upon its small, yet tight-knit, local psychedelic community.

The band claims as many as seven members at any given time, and eschews the common hierarchical band dynamic. "Everyone contributes to the writing and especially the arranging," says Alper. "I could say that ‘he’ or ‘she’ writes a majority of the songs, but some of what I come up with comes out of some loose thing the band will be playing around with at a practice. This is how community is built, but it takes effort too. Still, it’s very nice to be interacting with people who have some understanding and appreciation for where you are coming from."

As with any concentration of like-minded bands from a specific region that reach a larger audience, a strange romanticization takes place. Early press for Six Organs of Admittance seemed to portray Chasny as some kind of elfin naif hiding out in the mystical Santa Cruz Mountains, though at the time he spent much of his days working the buy counter at Streetlight Records. Similarly, press for Comets on Fire and Mammatus has often painted them as representative of a mysterious place full of acid-flashback rejects, who actually haven’t been seen much around these parts since the early ’70s.

Emmert finds these characterizations amusing. "Once in a while a band comes along that is really good, and kind of weird, so the writers eat it up because it makes them feel subversive and enlightened," says Emmert. "But if the band is derivative of ’60s acid dinosaur music and they’re from a town that is reportedly full of naked hippies climbing 300-foot redwood trees with holistic medicine retreats at the top, you’ve got a story there–you just struck gold."

Of course, reality is rarely so colorful. "I think people from out of town hear our music and they’ve never been to Santa Cruz, so they want to imagine that there is this cosmic commune of dirt people living on a farm together and taking acid and jamming all day, but we’re all just normal dudes with jobs who like to rock out," says Emmert. "I mean, doesn’t everyone love Black Sabbath and wanna jam like those guys? I think in terms of selling records, it’s good to come from Santa Cruz, because the reputation of the town as an artistically minded leftist hotbed of weirdness only increases our own weirdness in the minds of normies. I just hope [British music magazine] Mojo doesn’t send an investigative reporter down here to find out it’s really just a bunch of rich yuppies!"