I

I HAVE KNOWN Danny Miles for nearly all my adult life, and whilst I don’t like him very much (and never have, if I must tell the truth) it does seem that our destinies are somehow peculiarly linked. In many ways we are very similar; he is the part of my psyche which is unbelievably promiscuous, completely feckless and commodifies people to an insane extent. I am the part of his psyche who worries about things, drinks too much brandy, actually achieves things apart from mischief making, and has a conscience (although doesn’t always pay it much attention). About the only thing that we have in common is that we both want to change the world, albeit in completely different ways and for completely different reasons.

I am never particularly surprised when he turns up in my life, and so when he re-appeared a few weeks ago in the guise of the ‘Minister of Information’ for a group called Xtul I took it in my stride., It so happened that this time I knew a bit about – if not what he was talking about – what he was pretending to talk about. I also knew from whence he had lifted his influences.

Danny has always been a magpie, stealing ideologies from all and sundry. When I first met him back in the early 1980s, he had taken bits of the philosophy of Timothy Leary, mixed it with large chunks of Charlie Manson, and a pinch of Crowley and dressed it up in the then current peacock fashion styles of the New Romantics, and fused it all together to start a peculiar psychedelic sex cult. I was sucked in hook, line and sinker for a few months and even now my sleep (usually fairly calm due to the enormous amounts of chemicals my Doctor prescribes me) is sometimes shattered by lightning flashes of memory as I relive nights in the middle of a thunderstorm, dancing naked together with a group of other like-minded idiots - under the full moon, off my tits on psilocybin. Something that I really wouldn’t recommend to anybody reading this.

But now he was back, and once again stealing ideologies from anyone he cared to. All the bits about Minister for Information where from John Sinclair’s White Panther Party in the 1960s who, in turn, had stolen them from Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party. The idea of sending cryptic communiqués out anonymously was stolen piecemeal from The Angry Brigade, a relatively obscure British terrorist group of the early 1970s, and even the name Xtul had a long and somewhat sinister provenance.

It so happened that, totally by chance, I knew quite a bit about all three of these subjects. Ands I also knew that Danny did.. because most of his information had come from me in the first place. So after my first contact with him on the matter of Xtul a few weeks ago, and a couple of impressive looking Communiques which turned up in my email inbox but which, when one looked hard enough were purely sound and fury which signified nothing at all, I wasn’t particularly surprised when he turned up at my front door.

I was working in my lab late one night. Well, actually, I was. In 1800 there was a fire that burned down two very old cottages on the outskirts of Woolsery. Five years later a single, large cottage was built on the ruins, utilising bits of the ruins which were intact and at least 300 years old. In the 1950s a bit was built on the side, and in the 1970s another extension. My family have lived here since 1971, and I still do today. On the end of the house is an ancient lean-to that originally housed potatoes. It is my office, study, recording studio, editing suite, and yes…laboratory. And I was working in the potato shed late one night when my eyes did behold a terrible sight. It was Danny Miles dressed in a peculiar paramilitary uniform flanked by two tall figures wearing dark, hooded robes.

Here we go again, I thought.

He opened the door and the three of them walked in without knocking. I often sleep very badly, and so it was about 3:00am and Mother had gone to bed about three hours before. An hour or so later, Corinna (my lovely, and long suffering wife) went to bed, followed by the small gaggle of carnivores who always accompany her (two cats, a terrier and what seems at first to be a small pygmy hippo which upon closer investigation is a bulldog x boxer bitch called Prudence). There were various fish, and amphibians, doing their own inimitable thing in their tanks which are scattered about the building, there were Corinna’s pet rats, and of course there were the various ghosts with which the house is infested, but I was the only primate still awake.

They came in to my study uninvited; the two robed figures stood implacably by the door, and – as far as I am able to remember – said nothing at all during the whole time they were with me, and Danny (unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever met him) started to talk – nineteen to the dozen – as soon as he entered.

Once again he was talking about a band called Xtul. He had played me a few songs by them before, and sent me a few more via Dropbox, and I thought that they were truly excellent. Danny really didn’t have to blackmail me into writing about them. But approaching things in a conventional style, like asking a music journalist to write about a new band just isn’t his style. He had something on me (he was privy to information about me that he thought nobody knew, although that wasn’t actually the case) and was determined to use it as leverage to use me for his own nefarious ends.

I couldn’t be bothered to argue the toss with him, (it was pointless to explain that her husband never did find out, and that she went on to marry someone else well over fifteen years ago) and so I sat him down and did my best to find out some more information about this peculiar band Xtul. It so happened that I knew a bit about a certain quasi-Satanist occult group who apparently took legal action against Ed Sanders, author of the Charlie Manson biog ‘The Family’ saying that their inclusion in the book has brought the Satanist occult group into disrepute. They had lived in a Mexican coastal village called Xtul for a while, and I wondered whether there was any connection between this and this mysterious musical ensemble? Or whether, as was perfectly possible, Danny had just nicked the title from somewhere because it sounded good.

He told me a little bit more about them. Apparently there were three of them – Mr Loxodonta, Mistress Discordia, and Panne - and none of them were human anymore. When he started talking up a farrago of occult nonsense about how each of them had been turned into Gods and/or Daemons by events of an incalculable cosmic majesty my brain started to go to sleep. I remembered only too well how a harmless practical joke played by two Wildlife Officers upon a spectacularly inept UFO Research Group, once sucked into the vortex which is Dany Miles and spat out again, became a sinister conspiracy theory that nearly got my arrested by Special Branch, and involved an escaped murderer, several occult rituals, and the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and drugs. If you don’t believe me, check out a little thing I wrote fifteen years ago called The Blackdown Mystery. It is mildly amusing, and whilst I made some of it up (mostly to take the piss out of Nick Redfern) it does provide a valuable object lesson in how not to take Danny Miles too seriously.

I have taken what he said cum grano salis ever since. Three Gods, with a coterie of hooded followers who happen to play guitars, piano and bass? Three malevolent Gods with no reason to perceive humanity with anything but contempt and anger? Three Gods (one male, one female, and one gender neutral) who happen to form a progressive hip hop band? I didn’t believe a word of it!