The Evening Tickler

What happens when a man in his prime, at the barrel-chested height of his powers, turns his back on the Faustian bargain he has foresworn and walks away? Attempts to slip Mephistopheles' noose, slackens his grip on sex, power, money, and embarks upon a solitary expedition across the Sahara of his own soul? He ends up just outside of Delancey sporting a plump tab at Wild Common Wines and a hundredweight of Kleenex. Ladies and Gentleman, Derek Curl. Filmmaker, powerbroker, raconteur, Wayside habitué and self-confessed recovering Monster. The sort of man you'd expect to greet you on his porch in a paisley dressing gown, waving a bottle of Chivas with a pistol down his y-fronts. Will he escape himself? Will he acquiesce to destiny? Pull over at the Tickler, the only gas station for a hundred miles around, where the nachos are salty and the pumps primed for a gravelly highball of baritone Southern Gothic.

Intro: Toots and the Maytals - Monkey Man

Outro: Toots and the Maytals - Pressure Drop

What happens when a man in his prime, at the barrel-chested height of his powers, turns his back on the Faustian bargain he has foresworn and walks away? Attempts to slip Mephistopheles' noose, slackens his grip on sex, power, money, and embarks upon a solitary expedition across the Sahara of his own soul? He ends up just outside of Delancey sporting a plump tab at Wild Common Wines and a hundredweight of Kleenex. Ladies and Gentleman, Derek Curl. Filmmaker, powerbroker, raconteur, Wayside habitué and self-confessed recovering Monster. The sort of man you'd expect to greet you on his porch in a paisley dressing gown, waving a bottle of Chivas with a pistol down his y-fronts. Will he escape himself? Will he acquiesce to destiny? Pull over at the Tickler, the only gas station for a hundred miles around, where the nachos are salty and the pumps primed for a gravelly highball of baritone Southern Gothic.

Intro: Toots and the Maytals - Monkey Man

Outro: Toots and the Maytals - Pressure Drop

Delaware County is no country for old men. The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees, the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas. And therefore Steve and Julian have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium. Meet Z. You might have met her almost anywhere. On a riverboat chugging up the Congo with Placido Domingo and a dwarf. Spelunking the catacombs under Hagia Sophia. A bar in Puerto Montt carving the flourish of her initial into a sea-captain's wooden leg. Z. Zorro. Zipporah, wife of Moses, ancestor of the Druze. Instead, you're meeting her upon the frozen, sexless tundra of the Upper Catskills. Elizabeth the First of Argyle Farms, complete with pedigree lurchers, a pet ram and a cast of twenty Roberto Devereaux's. Secret lovechild of Holly Golightly and Gertrude Stein, Z regales the mountain airwaves with tales of Constantinople, the lost tribes of Montenegro and Zaire, Gavrilo Princip with a pistol in his pants. Lend an ear to this, the inaugural Z Tickling, and tell your children you were there when it happened.

Intro: John Cooper Clarke - Evidently Chickentown

Outro: John Cooper Clarke - Beasley Street

Delaware County is no country for old men. The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees, the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas. And therefore Steve and Julian have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium. Meet Z. You might have met her almost anywhere. On a riverboat chugging up the Congo with Placido Domingo and a dwarf. Spelunking the catacombs under Hagia Sophia. A bar in Puerto Montt carving the flourish of her initial into a sea-captain's wooden leg. Z. Zorro. Zipporah, wife of Moses, ancestor of the Druze. Instead, you're meeting her upon the frozen, sexless tundra of the Upper Catskills. Elizabeth the First of Argyle Farms, complete with pedigree lurchers, a pet ram and a cast of twenty Roberto Devereaux's. Secret lovechild of Holly Golightly and Gertrude Stein, Z regales the mountain airwaves with tales of Constantinople, the lost tribes of Montenegro and Zaire, Gavrilo Princip with a pistol in his pants. Lend an ear to this, the inaugural Z Tickling, and tell your children you were there when it happened.

Intro: John Cooper Clarke - Evidently Chickentown

Outro: John Cooper Clarke - Beasley Street

A week haunting the abandoned copper mines of old Cumbria finds the Tickler back in Roxbury once again, wrapping a delightful noodle around its fork. Peter Crosby, photographer, filmmaker, erstwhile cricketer and demon berber of Harrogate, London, Australia, Newcastle, Zurich, Moscow, Paris and New York, now finds his bottle bobbing in the flotsam of Livingston Manor, which is close to where Bovina Farmer finds it whilst wandering the strand at the Wayside Tap Room on Locals' Night. He bends down, plucks it from the spume, fag ends, empty Gatorade bottles and sundry detritus of other shipwrecks, and pops it in his pocket. Where it skulks unnoticed for a fortnight, until Julian asks Steve if he's just pleased to see him. Whereupon it is placed upon the table at WIOX and a dirty pinkie is employed to extract its blurred and blotted message. The audience holds its breath. Listen, Stanger, on this island now ...

Intro: Cibo Matto - Sugar Water

Outro: Cibo Matto - Know Your Chicken

No cult can thrive if it turns its back on new members. But equally, the cult that opens its doors to every passing noodle will soon be a cult no more. The Branch Bovinians are scrupulous in sniffing out new victims. Meet Betty Powell. Initially indoctrinated by her son Neil (Underlord of the Sigil of Baphomet 2010-2013, and expert in the pseudosacramental use of urine), Betty proved herself a quick learner in her own right. Within a couple of months of arriving from Kentucky, she had the wiggly handshake down and was well on her way with the breast baring, blood letting, polygamy, genital mutilation and donning of the rams-horn hat. Over chalked pentagrams and goblets of child-blood at the WIOX temple, Steve and Julian mull over the vagaries of mid-life reinvention with Bovina's latest and most charming novice.

Intro: Ivor Cutler - Jam

Outro: Ivor Cutler - Darling, Will You Marry Me Twice

No cult can thrive if it turns its back on new members. But equally, the cult that opens its doors to every passing noodle will soon be a cult no more. The Branch Bovinians are scrupulous in sniffing out new victims. Meet Betty Powell. Initially indoctrinated by her son Neil (Underlord of the Sigil of Baphomet 2010-2013, and expert in the pseudosacramental use of urine), Betty proved herself a quick learner in her own right. Within a couple of months of arriving from Kentucky, she had the wiggly handshake down and was well on her way with the breast baring, blood letting, polygamy, genital mutilation and donning of the rams-horn hat. Over chalked pentagrams and goblets of child-blood at the WIOX temple, Steve and Julian mull over the vagaries of mid-life reinvention with Bovina's latest and most charming novice.

Intro: Ivor Cutler - Jam

Outro: Ivor Cutler - Darling, Will You Marry Me Twice

The kraken wakes. Like squid, Steve and Julian heave from the inky depths of a Catskills winter, their giant eyes bulging, their mantles barnacled and studded with old Gatorade bottles. Through the last fathom they spy the shimmering image of Ellen Crawford, perched upon a rock above the Little Delaware combing her golden hair and singing the kind of song that gladdens all six hearts of two lovesick squid. Pull up a stool at the bar of the Sailors Arms, order up a flagon of ale and a packet of Walker's Cheese & Onion, eavesdrop on two crusty cephalopods plying the Mermaid of Hamden for salty tales. Of the south. Of having gills and a fishtail for legs. Of dancing for kings and the head of John the Baptist.

Intro: Bonnie Price Billy - Just To See My Holly Home

Outro: Belle and Sebastian - A Century of Fakers

The kraken wakes. Like squid, Steve and Julian heave from the inky depths of a Catskills winter, their giant eyes bulging, their mantles barnacled and studded with old Gatorade bottles. Through the last fathom they spy the shimmering image of Ellen Crawford, perched upon a rock above the Little Delaware combing her golden hair and singing the kind of song that gladdens all six hearts of two lovesick squid. Pull up a stool at the bar of the Sailors Arms, order up a flagon of ale and a packet of Walker's Cheese & Onion, eavesdrop on two crusty cephalopods plying the Mermaid of Hamden for salty tales. Of the south. Of having gills and a fishtail for legs. Of dancing for kings and the head of John the Baptist.

Intro: Bonnie Price Billy - Just To See My Holly Home

Outro: Belle and Sebastian - A Century of Fakers

Once every few months a cleft opens up in the Catskills landscape whereby so much occult strangeness has seeped into the lives of the Brothers Tickler, there simply isn't space for a third kneeler at their communion. On these occasions - usually after enforced separation - the last two remaining Bovina Trappists don cassock and surplice, jimmy the locks off the tabernacle and go at the sacraments like Elvis at an all-you-can-eat peanut butter banana and bacon buffet. Tiptoe into the cathedral, take a pew at the back as Frère Steve chants a tender Dies irae to his father and reflects upon the existential vertigo to which we acquiesce, when we agree to ride the Wall of Death.