B-Side Sunday.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. We all need something to instill our lives with a sense of order, love, ritual, faith, duty, mercy and hope. B-Side Sunday understands. It exists so that others don’t have to, striving on through the weeks as all those around it crumble in disillusion and despair. Like The Rolling Stones, it’s incredible that this weekly ceremony is still going. B-Side Sunday is the paper napkin that has outlasted every tea towel in the kitchen, archly defying the common rules of blog disposability.

In the rectory, the vicar sits watching Terminator with the sound off, doing coke off his own bicep and refusing to answer to any other name than Il Duce. The parishioners have settled in the church and the old dear on the organ has been playing for fifteen minutes, but the Xanax scripts never arrived and the vicar has consequentally been up for four days straight, dark lines shine like bruises under his eyes whilst his furrowed brow hangs like a month-old colostomy bag. Sleep has eluded him for over 100 party-fuelled hours as he sits languidly twitching beside an empty wrap. Dotted amongst the pews, the congregation wait patiently; a few staring impassively at the half-empty can of Red Stripe perched the ledge of the pulpit and the piles of discarded Rizla papers that are dotted around the altar. A plane passes overhead. In the distance, a car backfires. After a twenty minute delay, the rectory door flies open and the vicar slinks wearily out into the church, mustering enough energy to goosestep to the pulpit and assert that punctuality may be a virtue, but so is brevity. In the spirit of that aphorism comes today’s B-Side: ‘Smash You’ by The Ramones, a two minute gasp of gutter-punk that amounts to a short, sharp slap of riotous thunder.

Brilliant flipside to the ‘Howling at the Moon’ 12″ single, Joey squeals like a sodomised choirboy as the band play with the clammy neediness and urgency of a stalker clasping their terrified beloved as sirens wail in the distance. It could force a traffic cone to have fun and, as it roars through the church and around the heads of the befuddled parishioners, rattles fillings and sends wigs flying with punk aplomb.

As the feedback gives way to a cautious optimism amongst the faithful, the vicar’s voice is on its last legs, sounding rougher and more world-weary than Tom Waits after a month of smoking tea bags rolled in newspaper. Concluding that there no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference, he stands patiently to attention as the congregation file out into the cloudy daylight before collapsing into the confession box, striking his head against the edge of the bench and knocking himself unconscious. Things have a habit of working themselves out. Amen.