There is only one gig to be at this week…. Elvis’s Big Fat Birthday Potty at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel on Friday January 8.

With the King of Cheese Chad Romero and the Cheddar Cheese Straws or whatever they are called 'rapping' up the evening it will be more fun than nude twister under a sprinkler in the back yard. Well, maybe not that much fun but it will be funnier than hitting Mike Rann with a rolled up magazine.

You can stick your sappy Chorus Lions up yer ringpieces with their pathetic gold-ish duds.... Because this is the time to see the Fat Pelvises go for the real  GOLD. Yes, the real lame gold suits - I think that should be:  Real Gold Lame Suits - will be a highlight of the Fat Elvis performance, paying tribute to the King when he was really a king with a pure gold dress suit, mother of pearl shirt and platinum bow tie, stainless steel socks and tinplate nappies.

Come and help the Fat Bastards celebrate the Birth of the King. Not good King Wenceslas or King fukken Tut;  THE KING. ELVIS freaking PRESLEY who is having another birthday while being presumably dead! By the way, do you realise that if Elvis hadn’t died umty-um years ago he would still be alive today! If he hadn’t died some other time since then.

SO…. Forget amateur high-kicking stuff like Corny Lines, forget your washed up nobodies like Sting and Johnny Cash, don’t waste money on tickets for the next Amy Winehouse or Michael Jackson concert, come out and be totally disgusted by THE FAT ELVISES BIG FAT BIRTHDAY POTTY. There'll be more singing and dancing than a whole flock of chickens on a 'lectric BBQ plate!

You will hear songs such as that one that everybody likes and that one that nobody understands… and there’s that one about Elvis's Mom.... now that’s really funny. A bit off-colour but funny, and there will also be that one that made all the new-agers leave in disgust that other time. Get your tickets through the Gov Website or any way you can. If you don’t go to the Fat Elvises' Big Fat Birthday Potty with Chad Romero you’ll probably not see it.

Oh.. there might be another gig or two somewhere….

Thursday January 5 Sweet Baby James and Rob Eyers at the Gilbert Street Hotel. Double Voodoo blues from 7 pm till 10. Sweet and hot yet strangely cool.   And....

Saturday January 7, Sweet Baby James and Rob Eyers will be at The Wheatie,  Thebarton. There is a 9 pm kick off for that show.

Sunday 15th January - Rodney Hutton EP Launch at The Promethean, 116 Grote St, City.   Doors open 6:30pm; Tickets $20 (includes EP) Available through MoshTix or at the door. (support by Emily Davis)

Now, here's someone who has been quiet of late: It's another epistle from Paul the Merchant Banker in Hell.

Set-up: Like all merchant bankers, my Cousin Paul was an unmitigated bug-infested front bottom. Happily, for many thousands of people, he stressed out and kicked the bucket early in life and found that his God had honoured his wishes. Paul always said that Heaven would be boring as it was full of do-gooders; he’d rather go to Hell where there was more interesting people. Paul got his wish and found himself residing at 668, Hellsbottom Rd., in the exclusive Hadean suburb of Asphodelfield with the Dark Lord as his neighbour. My Cousin is now the Neighbour of The Beast.  And, as he found out, it is Hell having Satan as a neighbour! He writes me often through my Ouija board. Here is his latest epistle: Another great day in Hell, by The Nighhbour of The Beast.

Dear F’nuckle,

When I elected to come down here I was sure it would be full of great bastards like myself and we would have a cracking good time. I did not anticipate that Satan, my neighbour, would be the biggest bastard of all by miles and fukken miles. By the bye, something that worries me is that the house on the other side, which is now vacant, is being prepared, I heard, for occupation by some absolute witch they call the Iron lady who is suffering from aluminium poisoning and loopy as a boy scout’s poo.

Anyway … when I last wrote I had dumped a crate of Satan’s home brew – Deathly Pale Ale -  in Dante’s incinerator, if you remember ( Dante is my neighbour over the back fence )  and all went as predicted… for a few moments. Then it turned to shit. When Dante lit his little inferno the highly explosive brew went up like Hiroshima and I wished I was there to see it -  I had made myself absent that weekend hoping to not be around when the shit hit the fan, so to speak. Well, the lid of the incinerator got blasted about 6 miles high and came down straight through my roof. The explosion set off a thunderstorm which rained through the hole in my roof. The dog shit from Satan’s Hell Hounds I had tossed onto Satan’s roof got washed down the guttering in the storm and it was only later I found out the bastard had routed his stormwater run-off into my yard. Another great day in Hell. But it gets worse…

Christmas Day… I’m getting mulled with a slab and a carton of Benson and Hedges twelves when there's a raucous knock at the door.   Good neighbour Satan.

“Don’t sit there by yourself,” he shouts in pretend jolliness, “Bring your box of piss and your presents over now and share them around….”

“What do you mean by ‘presents’?”

“Your Christmas present to me; I want an Xbox 3000 with surround sound and sub-thumpers from you.”

“But… but….. You’re Satan… you don’t do Christmas.”

“You’re a bit right,” laughed Satan. “I am Satan and I can do what I fukken like! So get over to my joint and bring my present.”

“But you can’t be the antichrist and have Christmas, or Christmas presents! Isn’t that sort of… hypocritical?”

And this is that part that made me steam my eyeballs. “Paul,” he says, wrapping his giant scaly arm around my shoulder and breathing smoke in my face…. "When you started work as a bank teller, many years ago, did you join the union?”

“Well, yes, I had to, to get the job. But… I never paid the dues after the first year.”

“I know that,” he says. “Because you don’t like unions, do you? You’re a blue-blood, a white collar manager type, aren’t you? You’d never be in a ‘Union’. Perhaps a ‘Guild’, or a ‘League’ or an ‘Association’ or a 'Club', eh? But never a ‘Union’.   Did you, however, after that first year, accept all the pay raises that were awarded to bank tellers through the union’s activities? HmmMMM?”

“Well, … they were … sort of….”

“Yes. You did…. even though you weren’t in the union and you also hated the union; and when you became a manager you fought to get the union rep sacked and the organisation discredited…”
“Well…. Yes, sort of…” I replied.

“No ‘sort of’ about it, Son. I know you did. You were a hypocrite, then, weren’t you, Old Son. Just like one of those hypocrites Bob Marley used to wail about, eh? That’s one of the reasons why you’re here, isn’t that so? Being a fukken hypocrite, eh?”

“Well, Yes, I guess so….”

“Well…  I too, am a hypocrite, Paul, as you can well imagine,”  said Satan, grinning from horn to horn. “But I‘m a fukken bigger hypocrite than you are. So get over to my joint in half a fukken hour with my fukken Xbox three-fukken-thousand or I will curse your dick to always piss on your fukken fingers!”

So now I’ve maxxed out my credit card thanks to that XBox,  and getting over-the-limit penalties and the overdraft interest is killing me and because I’m on fixed income I don’t know how I can get in front again.  Jeez… This place is full of arseholes!

Yours sincerely,

Paul,  the Merchant Banker in hell.