I recorded an album once.

(And just writing that I can hear the assembled chair-creak as my readership leans a little closer, and - in the crueler case - prepare to cut and paste to forward to mates.)

I was 21, a couple of years after I became something resembling me, I spent a year in the States. In a bedsit. A car-drive's away from anywhere interesting, and not having a car. Despite managing to amass some of the better stories in the period - including the "Murder Suspect" one - I was bored beyond all human endurance, and distracted myself in a number of ways. In the periods I became to red raw to continue masturbating, I recorded 11 tracks on a four track I'd somehow managed to get hold of. 10 original compositions and a cover ("Come out 2nite" by Kenickie). It was called "40 Days" in a vague reference to the Invisibles episode I'd just read - it was also the period where I was first being introduced to comics.

My voice is terrible. I can only play bar-chords on guitars. My bass is rudimentary. And my drum-machine know-how is little better than fiddling with pre-sets. But I did it anyway, as my mind was on fire and if I didn't get some of the thoughts down in some coherent fashion, I'd have combusted. My 21 was most other zine-kids 16. I was a late developer like that, but since I was born at 19, didn't consider it that bad.

I was visiting my Mate Pete last weekend. He's about to talk his girlfriend - also a long-time friend - Josie and sod off to New Zealand, and he's pig sick of our stupid country and wants to travel and be pig-sick with everywhere else for a while. In between our usual distractions - namely lengthy and pointless arguing about every matter concievable - he threw me something that I'd virtually forgotten about.

The lyric sheet of the album.

Now, I've got a copy of the tape myself. There's about nine other people who possess one too - including Pete. I've long since lost my own copy. This is the biggest shock I've had since the last time I visite Pete, when he almost caused Jane to die of a laughter-indused prolapse and me to swallow my own fist when he showed us the video of my first band, Fixation.

I read them.

And they're lyrics written by me. Clearly so. Painfully so. And - occasionaly - gloriously so. Some bits are so banal I want to invent a time-machine to throttle myself. Others, so pure and stupid and dumb that I'm almost glad I was stuck in that Colorado hell. But, more than anything, clearly me.

My obssessions are identical. Well - mostly. Some have virtually disappeared - the song about RSI, for example. I no longer care about my various physical complaints, as complanining is, by its nature, boring. The remains of my teenage goth-flirtations occasionally show up, not helped by having recently read Paradise Lost for the first time. But the rest - hatred of nostalgia culture, hatred of the end of history, the belief in the fluidity of identity, the joys of strong friendships and casual sex. It's me. An unpolishes me, but me nevertheless.

And, yes, most of it is terrible. And I've got the terrible habit of writing them as *writing* rather than *lyrics*.

The one that I find least embarassing, and the one I'm going to print in its entirity here, is a little thing called The Last Lyric On The Earth. Written directly after a conversation with Peter about a friends' inability to write lyrics. I went back to a pad after I put down the phone and saw the last thing I'd scrawled - and it was just as bad as what I mocked. So I screwed up a pen and tried to write something to justify my own inflated sense of belief. I was pleased with it then, and most of it holds up now. Well - bar the bits about lemmings, the bits that show how much Manics I was listening to back then and the line with the word "Epitath". The song itself was also one of the better ones - the first three quarters is vaguely folky acoustica. A false end at the close of the third verse. Then it reignites as a stompy clash thing, all syncopated riffs descending into driven feedback before fading out to repeated howls. And I'm still proud of it, as Juvenalia and as a reminder that once I had that ludicrous purity of belief.

So. Here he is. Kieron Gillen. 21 years old, wanting to tear the world's eyes out for pissing him off and promising to never give up until he proves them all wrong.

The Last Lyric on Earth

This is the last lyric on Earth
This is the last thing left to talk about
This is the epitaph of our minds
This is the last lyric on Earth
This is the last thoughts than can be contained in verse
This is the last chapter of our tale
This is our gravestone and our hearse
This is the last lyric on Earth

And no-one seems to mind

This is the last lyric on Earth
As all the lines have been spoke before
And just like Lemmings off a cliff
Something’s got to give
This is full stop, end of paragraph
This is our valium, beloved Sedative
This song is drunk on old newsprig
This is the last lyric on Earth

And no-one seems to mind

That was the last lyric on Earth
And perhaps now’s the time to say goodbye
And dry the dead lips and kiss the corpse
Of the last lyric on Earth

This is our wake-up call.
This is our kiss goodbye to irony
This is a toast to the return of soul
This is the last lyric on Earth
And between the 0s and 1s.
Between Aristotle’s Dichotomy
Past what we’ve ever learnt
Is the last lyric on Earth

And that lyric can never die.

If you’re listening in reverse.
Earth the on Lyric Last The

This is the Last Lyric on Earth.