Fuck me! Steven Seagal is touring

After Anna and I had rehearsed yesterday we decided to take advantage of a very fine summer evening and go for a pint in the Prince of Wales. Granted, this is hardly a momentous thing to occur and 'Two Musicians Go Drinking' is never likely to attract many headlines. In fact, you're probably wondering why I'm bothering to tell you this.....

BUT WAIT!

.....An innocent and cheeky couple of pints on an otherwise uneventful night was about to become hugely significant for us.

The Prince of Wales, Yesterday

We had been chatting with our friend James for a while and we eventually got on to the subject of gigs and bands we'd seen, swapping tales of bands who had been great and lamentable tales of bands who had been awful. We were having a fine old time of it, I must say. Then James dropped his bombshell....

Casually puffing away on a fag during a brief lull, and completely unaware of the 743 shades of almightly hell he was about to unleash, he said to us, "My brother-in-law is going to see Steven Seagal's band in September".

Now, I don't know what kind of reaction he expected to that statement, but I'd wager that the one he got took him completely by surprise. It may even have scared him a little.

In the immeadiate aftermath of the words hitting us like a juggernaut, James was greeted by Anna screaming with delight and me unable to express my happiness in any other way than to issue a vicious string of swearwords joined together with exclamation marks and incredulous spittle. After this initial explosion subsided James was then faced with a barrage of questions as we launched into him, attempting to garner more information with some kind of demented 'Bad Cop / Bad Cop' routine. On mushrooms.

James clearly had no idea of the level, the depth, the full-fathom-fucking-five-ness of the importance of Seagal to Friends of the Stars. He is our talisman, our guardian angel and the very GLUE that binds us together. To us, he is the greatest movie star to have walked the planet and we have been known to cancel rehearsals, move recording dates and even NOT TURN UP FOR GIGS when there is a Seagal movie on Channel 5. I'm serious, dudes, this devotion borders on obsession.

When things go wrong for us, when things look bleak and we think we're ploughing a lonely, pointless and ultimately doomed furrow, when yet one more thing has gone tits up and we're about to tear it all down, give up and resign ourselves to the thought that we will live out the rest of our days with the stench of faliure and a feeling of regret deep down in our wrethched, twisted and unfulfilled guts, we stop.

We pause.

We take a moment to reflect.

We B-R-E-A-T-H-E.

Then we look at each and a collective thought occurs to us:

'What would Steven Seagal do?'

..and then it's all ok again.

What a day! To find out so casually that the man himself will visit our town and play a gig with his band 'Thunderbox' quite literally made our year. Sod the release of 'Lighting & Electrical', Sod being invited onto the bill of 'Moseley Folk Festival' - THIS is Steven fucking Seagal, man, and the year 2006 was made for us in that moment. The man who brought such gravitas to the role of Sasha Petrosevitch in 2002's 'Half Past Dead' is now going to be here playing songs from his new album Mojo Priest...

For the record, my favourite Seagal movie is the environmental epic 'On Deadly Ground', but Anna disagrees with me. She prefers the classic 'Under Seige' - and in particular the seminal 'Hide in the fridge!' scene. Whilst we both agree that the brief flirtation with black cop / white cop movies some years back was perhaps ill-advised, we see this merely as a BLIP and blame the herd mentality of Hollywood producers rather than the great man himself.

To see a complete list of the Seagal cinematic ouevre click here
To visit the great man's official homepage click here
To buy the album 'Mojo Priest' on CD from Amazon click here
For downloads visit iTunes, innit

Bye for now,
x